You may want to rethink the use of hyphens in your domain name. I can't tell you how much I came to regret my choice of using a hyphenated domain after a while. I promise that you will quickly tire of telling people "Check out the site at The dash local dash kitchen dot com."
LocalKitchenKit.com is available... I'd just steer clear of those hyphens if I were you ;)
I think you hit the nail on the head. With all of the resources that are currently available on the internet, it is easier than ever for a non-technical person to learn enough about programming for them to piece together a programatic solution to a wide variety of problems.
In an age where many people spend 40+ hours per week in front of a computer screen, even a small marginal increase in a computer user's productivity could save them hundreds of hours a year. As a result, it seems like a completely reasonable investment of a non-technical person's time and energy to learn enough about programming to enable them to scrap together a program that allows them to accomplish simple tasks more efficiently.
Would a professional programmer be able to write better code more quickly? Of course. But would a person with zero programming knowledge even recognize when a particular task they are spending hundreds of hours each year manually performing could easily be automated? Probably not.
I don't anything about couriers' systems to have an idea whether or not it would be feasible to build something that integrates with them (or how difficult it would be to design one end-to-end).
If you could design the thing end-to-end, I wonder if switching barriers would make adoption difficult.
Shipping consolidators pick up a shipper's parcels, sort and route them, then enter them into the Postal system for final delivery.
A shipping consolidator startup would be able to offer many of the value-added services on your wishlist without facing the barriers of starting a stand-alone national carrier or the limitations associated with local/regional carriers.
Of course, you lose control of the actual handling of the package after turning it over to a 3rd party carrier. Still, I'd imagine that a shipping consolidator using RFID data could develop a sufficiently sophisticated predictive model capable of providing much more accurate delivery estimates than those provided by the UPS, FedEX, et al.
But I don't want to go to FedEx Kinkos to ship a package. I live in the city and its a pain in the ass to walk 5 blocks with a couple of big packages and stand in line at a Kinkos. I want shipping a package to be as simple as receiving a package. Then, I want to be able to receive more useful information on the package's status delivered in real time to my smartphone.
If there are enough low-volume customers willing to pay a premium for a higher level of service, then it might might economic sense. Sure, a small individual customer isn't giving them enough business to be worth making all of these expensive changes, but the aggregate of all small customers combined might.
It isn't quite like replacing the meat section with a vegetarian section... its more like adding an organic foods section to a supermarket. Those supermarkets still might make most of their money on things like the meat, but certain people willing to pay a premium for perceived quality take advantage of the organic section. People who want meat can still buy meat, but there are enough people who buy organic to make it worth dedicating the shelf space.
Edit: I wonder if the reason we don't see this level of service in the market yet is because the type of players who would benefit most from these features are likely to be small local/regional carriers who lack the expertise/resources to develop and implement the technology. If I'm in Chicago and I need to get some time-sensitive documents to a law firm by the end of the day, I call a small local courier.
Perhaps the best solution would be a third-party SaaS platform that offers these advanced logistics/tracking/service features and targets smaller local/regional carriers. A single third party developer could spread development costs over a large number of customers in order to build a much more robust platform than would be economically feasible to develop in-house.
Section 7(a)(G)(ii)(IX) would require that crowdfunding intermediaries require "each potential investor to answer questions demonstrating competency in" understanding various types of risks involved in such investments. Should the SEC be required to provide a list of questions which, if answered correctly by potential investors, would provide a safe-haven to the intermediary? If not, should the bill be more specific with regard to the level of competency to be demonstrated?
Sec. 7(a)(G)(ii)(XI) requires intermediaries to carry out a background check on the issuer's principals. What must such a background check consist of in order to satisfy this criteria? How is this information to be used? (kept on file by intermediary? Disclosed to potential investors? Filed with the commission?)
Dennis Chookaszian, former CEO of CNA Insurance Companies, recently told me "Pick Two: Work, Family, Personal. I have never known anyone to be successful at all three." This message resonated with me.
Chookaszian has chosen work and family. By all accounts, he has been very successful professionally and the stories he recounts about his family, casually woven into almost every conversation I've had with him, I am lead to believe that he has also managed to maintain great relationships with his wife and children.
In order to pursue successful and meaningful work and family lives, he had to give up his personal interests. As a young man he loved working on cars. He got a great deal of enjoyment out of fixing up old Porshes. About 30 years ago he purchased a Porshe that needed an engine rebuild. He took the engine out of the car and began working on it. Meanwhile, he got married and had children. Where is that engine today? It sits, neglected, in the same place and condition that he left it in 30 years ago. "I now know that engine will still be sitting there long after I am gone," he quipped.
In that same conversation, he also made another keen observation: "When someone says that they want 'work/life balance,' what they really mean is that they don't want to be in an executive position." For CEOs of successful companies, there isn't such thing as work/life balance. If you want that balance, you can be successful in middle management, but only those who are truly passionate and dedicated to their work make successful CEOs.
To illustrate the point, he mentioned a recent email he received from the CEO of a company. Chookaszian is a director on the board of the firm, and the company was dealing with a crisis. The CEO wanted to let him know that he would be out of town for about a week on vacation. The notion that someone would follow through with vacation plans in the midst of a company crisis was, in his view, absurd. "As a director, when I heard news of the company crisis, I cut short my ski trip with my wife and flew home on the next flight in order to deal with the issue." If the CEO felt that his vacation plans superseded his obligations as a CEO, it wasn't likely that he would have a job to come back to after his trip.
This doesn't mean that you can't have a solid relationship with your family. However, success in business requires that you first fulfill your obligation to the company and its constituents. That duty will require sacrifice. It will require long hours at the office, vacations cut short, and kids' soccer games missed. When there is a critical decision to be made at the company, that must come first. The additional difficulty in the start-up context is that, in a company's infancy, critical decisions are being made almost constantly.
However, it also doesn't mean that you can't maintain happy relationships with your family members, but something has got to give. Namely, personal interests must be sacrificed.
Well put... I like the way you frame the argument around the concept of ownership.
However, we can't conflate access to another's property and the deprivation of that property. If I walk on my neighbor's lawn without his permission, I am accessing his property but not depriving him of ownership. Similarly, If I misappropriate someone's copyright, I am accessing his property but not depriving him of ownership.
In each case, the owner's rights are being invaded, but the owner is not deprived of ownership.
Perhaps this explains the problem analogizing copyright infringement to theft. It doesn't quite fit. Theft necessarily deprives the owner of his property, copyright infringement does not.
Therefore, a more appropriate analogy in the law might be to trespass. If someone trespasses on my property, they violate my right to exclude other's access to such property without stealing it. The same can be said for misappropriation of intellectual property.
The file-sharing/theft analogy is a fairly sound one. If I steal tangible property--say, a pack of gum--very few people would argue that my decision to do so was ethically defensible. Given that intangible property--say, a song--may be much more expensive to produce and arguably adds much more social value for having been created, why should we treat intangible property any differently?
Lets keep analogizing...
Like the manufacturer of the pack of gum, the song's creator has invested time and money into the development, production, and distribution of that product. And like the gum, the song has some intrinsic value (or else why would I take the time to download and listen to it?). Why should I be able to realize that value for my benefit without compensating the person responsible for its creation any more than I should be able to enjoy a delicious pack of bazooka joe without ponying up to the candy store?
One might argue that the ability to reproduce the digital download without imposing any cost on the creator of the intellectual property differentiates the intangible from the tangible. If my friend has 10 apples for sale at $1 a piece and I eat one while he isn't looking, he now only has 9 apples that he can sell, limiting his maximum gross revenue to $9. This feels wrong because the product is tangible & the loss quantifiable. On the other hand, if my other friend records a digital video that she is selling and I download it for free, she can still sell 10 more copies of the song and earn $10. However, had I paid for the download, she would have $11 rather than $10.
In each case, my unauthorized consumption left the person who had spent their own resources (both human and capital) with $1 less at the end of the day.
I might try and justify having downloaded the video for free by telling myself that my illicit consumption whet my appetite for her films, making me more likely to make purchases from her in the future. However, the same could be said for the juicy apple that I took from my other friend. Perhaps because I stole my first apple I will now come back and patronize his fruit stand regularly. Ultimately he will sell more fruit because of my indiscriminate apple theft, yet my original sin still feels unethical. As well it should.
Of course, it is easy to distinguish between downloading someone's intellectual property for personal use and misrepresenting another's intellectual property as your own, especially for commercial purposes. Yet, at their core, both acts simply represent varying degrees of the same unethical behavior.
Like it or not, your gain, whether tangible or intangible, comes at the expense of the counter-party to the would-be transaction. Further, if enough people felt justified in their apple theft, it would be harder to find a decent fruit stand. Fruit vendors would close up shop or begin selling cheaper, lower-quality apples in order to minimize their losses to theft. Similarly, if enough people feel as though misappropriating intellectual property is acceptable, it is much more difficult for creators of such to continue to afford create.
The ability to monetize one's work, whether it be apple mongering or song writing, incentivizes and finances the production and distribution of higher quality apples and songs. Remove those incentives and both the artist and the entrepreneur will ultimately be unable to sustain their efforts in the long-run.
Finally, I'd also like to note that, given the proximity of this hire to your series A funding, you may want to consider the tax implications involved in granting an equity stake to an employee.
If the company is valued at $30 million, then granting a new hire 10% of the stock in the company might be viewed as a taxable event by the IRS. In that case, your employee might find himself responsible for paying taxes on $3 million in income. You don't want to wind up with an employee who owes $750,000 to the IRS and can't pay it.
Consulting with a qualified attorney will be invaluable in structuring this transaction in order to avoid this sort of problem. With a valuation of $25-$30 million, you really must seek legal counsel in this matter before moving forward. With that much money on the line, you really can't afford NOT to have a good attorney on your side when you are putting together this deal.
Note: I am not a licensed attorney and this is not legal advice. Please seek the advice of qualified legal counsel.
As a starting point, it may be helpful to think about the equity stake that would be required in order to offer the potential employee compensation equivalent to that which he currently receives.
In my model, I assumed that he would receive a 5% raise in salary each year at either job. I assumed an 8% discount rate for his current salary, a 12% discount rate for his salary at your company, and a 25% discount rate for his equity cashout, which I assumed he would receive at the end of year 7. I also assumed that the growth rate for your firm's valuation would be 20% in year 1 and would decrease at a constant rate of 2% per year.
Under these assumptions, an equity stake around about 4.5% would yield a $2.56 Million payment when he sells his stake at the end of year 7. The net present value (NPV) of this one-time payment would be equal to $536,302 today. Taken together with his salary payments, the NPV of his total compensation package in this scenario over 7 years would be equal to the $1.13 Million NPV of his salary payments from his current job.
You can download the spreadsheet and can play around with the various assumptions that I made. The greater the risk associated with a particular stream of cashflows, the higher the discount rate should be.
Adjustments to these assumptions can have a significant impact on the NPV of the payments. For example, if we set the discount rate for his salary payments at your company to 16% and the discount rate for his equity cashout to 30%, then the equivalent equity stake would be more like 6.64%.
If you are able to make some reasonably accurate discount rate assumptions and valuation growth assumptions, then you should be able to get a reasonably good % equity stake that would compensate him for the decrease in salary.
From there, you might consider adjusting the offered equity stake upward... the spreadsheet will give you the equity stake that would presumably make him indifferent between choosing to stay at his current job or joining your team - In order to persuade him to join you, you want to be able to make him a better offer than that which he currently has.
