Both Alex and I are from California originally and moved to Austin because the business, legal and tax climate seemed a lot more friendly. It is!
The economy in Texas right now is stable, good and on the upswing, while California seems to be having problems. Plus the complete lack of any personal income tax means more spendable income, which is nice for us and for our future employees.
We looked at and weighed San Jose, Seattle and Austin (NYC and Boston were off the table due to high taxes and over regulation), and chose Austin purely for business reasons.
From what I found before moving here, 78759 is supposed to have the heaviest concentration of tech companies in Austin.
Most of the tech companies seem to be in the N/NW and downtown. As far as I know none are south of the river. Also I have heard Tech workers (for whatever reason) do not seem to live south of the river, which looks like a lot of older neighborhoods.
As far as a place to live, the Zip codes seem to get expensive in Austin based on the schools. So, if you have kids, then you need to think about a zip code with "good schools".
Facebook just setup operations in town, and both Microsoft and Rackspace have offices just south of town in San Antonio. A lot of other larger companies are here too. Redhat, Dell, ect...
The VC scene here seems pretty active. I am surprised PG has not thought about re-basing YCombinator out here in Austin, at least part of the time. The State of Texas offers some very creative business tax breaks to business that relocate to Texas. Plus the cities sometimes offer additional incentives to move established businesses.
Here are few local links for you to look at if you want:
I use Windows Live Messenger a lot more than email. It suits my personality and working style better.
I don’t bother saving the Messenger chats, but for email backups, I leave a copy on the email server, and download a copy to my machine with Outlook. My machine has 2 hard drives, and I have Outlook set up to auto back up to the second drive every time it closes.
Without having any guideline to go by, as far as the small cash amount, logically (not that the real life application of tax laws by the IRS is logical) it seems like paying PAR value in cash would cross that hurdle.
Think about something that the math represents that is useful and interesting to you. (i.e. speaker impedance calculations). Then research the math behind it on the internet. Research the formulas and use a spreadsheet to build/test your formulas.
To me, that's a lot more interesting way to learn math than going through a course.
Congratulations, based on this new competitor, it seems like you have found a target market that is worth going after with this product.
As far as having a NEW competitor, out market them quickly. The number of people who will want this is finite. So push hard (quickly) to get customers to adopt your product instead of theirs. As a quick push, possibly try advertising it strategically in certain forums and blogs and see if you can get some sales. The graphics on your site look decent, so try some skyscraper ads that feed into landing pages that are duplicates of your home page so you can see what is converting.
I would say focus on exploiting it for as much as it's worth financially (whatever that amount is). Do what you need to in order to sell as much as you can "quickly" (try to saturate the finite set of users with your product) and then possibly offer an upgraded Pro version for a small upcharge to your existing customers to take on some additional sales revenue. Price the Pro version a little behind the competitors product and add some features that your customers are asking for (get feedback from them for this purpose).
Also, if you think it's a head to head product and yours is better, possibly put a comparison of their product and yours right on the front page of your site.
Another thing is maybe think about getting some pro voice over talent for your video. Maybe a local radio station has someone who can do a good job for a low price. You might want to think about using a female voice and a male voice and do some A-B testing on the video. I think it will make the video seem more professional.
With an equal number of founder elected Directors and VC elected Directors, if your outside tiebreaker director is brought in by the VC's you will be in danger of losing control because you cannot control the situation.
Especially if the tie breaker is planning on doing some additional business with the VC in the future, you may not have a truly neutral person casting the vote.
So, how is founder control typically structured?
For instance, do founder Stockholders get 2 votes per share to elect Directors with, and VC's get 1 vote per share with a guaranteed VC director seat on the board? Or are Directors elected by founders getting 2 votes on a particular decision item A and 1 vote on decision item B, and VC Directors get 1 vote on A and B?
Does anyone know what is currently going on with this?
You should have found "one" who was interested (hot to work on your project) while you were there, and "closed the deal" right there.
Separate the wheat from the chaff, and ABC (always be closing)!
If you thought to get their e-mail (in my opinion, the best way to "initially" communicate with most coders) pop them an e-mail and see if they are still interested. Not everyone is a phone person.
It might be more productive to isolate genes that relate to a low IQ, and then discard those from the sample. When looking for a needle in a haystack it would make the haystack smaller.
Maybe think about building separate robots for each task (tub, etc...) that can be permanently attached to wall or the ceiling near its work spot. Tasks could be accomplished using special arms for each sub-task. A lifting arm, a chemical spraying arm, etc...
It would take the "where am I" "where is the target" out of the robots equation. You could simply hardcode the desired movements into the robot. Then if you wanted to sell them you could build a learning routine into the code so the public could easily use it after bolting it to the walls in their houses.
Why not just write it into Federal law that a site can act as its own registered DMCA Takedown Agent, instead of having everyone go through additional red tape and pay a $105 fee to run a blog.
In a way it seems like the fee to register is a freedom of speech issue. Pay an inconsequential tiny fee to run a blog, or potentially suffer huge financial losses. Kind of like the old Poll Tax from years ago.
It seems like being proactive as builders and maintainers of the internet, and getting a new field added to the WHOIS data for a DMCA takedown email addresses would make the process easier to administer for the complaintants, and more in keeping with Freedom of Speech that the United States is founded on.
The economy in Texas right now is stable, good and on the upswing, while California seems to be having problems. Plus the complete lack of any personal income tax means more spendable income, which is nice for us and for our future employees.
We looked at and weighed San Jose, Seattle and Austin (NYC and Boston were off the table due to high taxes and over regulation), and chose Austin purely for business reasons.
From what I found before moving here, 78759 is supposed to have the heaviest concentration of tech companies in Austin.
Most of the tech companies seem to be in the N/NW and downtown. As far as I know none are south of the river. Also I have heard Tech workers (for whatever reason) do not seem to live south of the river, which looks like a lot of older neighborhoods.
As far as a place to live, the Zip codes seem to get expensive in Austin based on the schools. So, if you have kids, then you need to think about a zip code with "good schools".
Facebook just setup operations in town, and both Microsoft and Rackspace have offices just south of town in San Antonio. A lot of other larger companies are here too. Redhat, Dell, ect...
The VC scene here seems pretty active. I am surprised PG has not thought about re-basing YCombinator out here in Austin, at least part of the time. The State of Texas offers some very creative business tax breaks to business that relocate to Texas. Plus the cities sometimes offer additional incentives to move established businesses.
Here are few local links for you to look at if you want:
http://austin.startupweekend.org/
http://conjunctured.com/
http://door64.com/
http://geekaustin.org/
http://sxsw.com/home
http://www.austintechhh.com/
http://www.kxan.com/dpp/news/business/too-many-jobs,-too-few...