You guys weren't joking when you said you were moving fast. Looks great. I'm kicking the tires now and will report back. As I told you in January, great damn idea. Let's grab a beer -Jason
It's about a future where our preoccupation with productivity led us to genetically engineer away our need/ability to sleep. In this future sleep becomes the drug of choice and the domain of the counter culture.
I have a framework I wrote last month and a good friend of mine is a sci-fi editor. She agreed to give me notes, mainly so I would leave her alone.
Not really going to set a word a day goal. With me, I find that sometimes only a few hundred words eek out. While other days 3000-4000 come out freely.
My method for getting a great coder even though you can't evaluate coding skills -
Hire a great coder to HELP YOU INTERVIEW. Find a great coder who's work you respect, who is currently employed and not looking to leave his position. PAY HIM his going rate to help assess your candidates.
Find candidates through local meetups, friends of friends, and this lovely community here. Above poster is correct, Good coders are respected. If you actually start becoming a part of the community you will start to find folks who might work out.
We liked freshbooks more than quickbooks, so I can say that it's a nice product.
But right now, I'm a big fan of what's going on over at Less Accounting. I think he's on the right track to the perfect small business solution. And the support level is unreal.
Ok, maybe I abbreviated my train of thought there. Let me elaborate.
And I am speaking solely from my knowledge of US History.
"Bi-Product of the industrial revolution." retirement came about SOLELY because of the industrial revolution. Prior to that most people were artisans and self-employed. However, once everyone got onto an assembly line, older people who couldn't keep up started gumming up the works. And they were being laid off in droves. To counteract that, Roosevelt, enacted Social Security as a form of "Old Age Insurance". Soon after, corporations started pension plans of their own. And this ushered in the era of "Companies look after their own" in America.
The point I was trying to make is that it use to be common belief that your employer would take care of you. It's not that way anymore.
This is really a question for your underwriter. As it varies greatly depending on who holds your merchant account. You are right, most credit cards are going to default to the unqualified rate anyway.
But the bigger problem is this.
If you get bare minimum information from your customers, and then for some reason you start getting more than a few charge-backs, they might close your merchant account. Which is a fun exercise in thinking on your feet =)
The best bet is to get a merchant account with an account representative that is familiar with your business model and talk to him about how you plan to proceed. You are much less likely to run into problems if they verbally signed off on your actions.
As to fees. This is really cart before the horse. You have no sales yet. Trust me, when you have a whole gang of sales, people will start tripping over themselves to process your transactions at a happier rate.
The modern assumption of retirement is a bi-product of the industrial revolution. Retirement was a brass ring that was held up for workers to see as a way to keep them productive and loyal for a long period of time. Just think of how many times you've heard the phrase "You don't want to jeopardize your pension do you?" said in a movie.
Unfortunately, greed, escalation, and bloat caught hold at lots of these companies. And the concept of company retirement became much more of a well organized ponzi scheme.
As one example, both of my parents were taught from an early age that they should grow up to work at one company for their entire life. And that's what they did. My mother, went to work for the local school system. And my father went to work for the local chemical production plant. When they started work they both expected a retirement package, payed into and provided solely by their employer.
Neither one got that. My mothers retirement plan converted. Into a 401k with a fractional matching contribution from the school district. So she went from 100% contribution from her employer, to 90% coming out of her paycheck. If she was to retire "on time".
My father had a much worse fate. He had a pension from his company and a company managed 401k. Both of which were gutted when the company was spun off in debt reallocation. He still has the company letters that shows him having over 1 Million dollars on paper as his retirement package. He retired with little more than a gold watch for 40 years on the job. I had to support him in the gap between his "retirement" and when his social security kicked in.
But the silver lining is that we can all learn from the fallacy of our predecessors. We can take responsibility for our own lives, happiness, and "retirement". That's a big reason why I work for myself.
And most of the people I know are into the "mini-retirement" concept that has been more recently popularized by Tim Ferris. Live now. Don't work your whole life to live later.
If you truly love the work that you do...who'd want to retire anyway?
So...are the children suppose to live in the school and never leave? Because the second they step out the door they are bound to run into a few rogue hotspots.
Even out in the rural areas of the US, you can usually find a wi-fi signal.
Was anybody else bothered by the giant moving spammy pop-up on that site? I'm currently reading on an iPhone and it took up practically the whole screen.
This has to be one of the best don't judge a book by it's cover biographies I've ever read. I love that he left MIT to persue acting. Follow your dream.
No, I stand by my statement. I don't believe that Facebook will continually dominate the hearts and minds of the online world in the way it does now, in perpetuity. My reason given for failure was "complacency and failure to inovate" which I believe is the downfall of most great companies. The companies that I listed were examples of this phenomenon. You can really take this theory all the way back to the Dutch east India trading company if you want to. Evolve or die. In all probability, someday facebook will stop evolving.
Now I'm currently refering to facebook failing in the same way that "Microsoft and Yahoo" have failed. They still exist, are still (quite) profitable, but their relavency is fading.
As to apple. I've always wondered if the magic there will continue after Steve Jobs dies.
Well, I'm glad to hear you say that. I actually read you as leaning the other way. I'm glad I was wrong. So let me jump in on this side.
The question is not opportunity vs. self-validation, it's opportunity vs opportunity. If you believe in what your doing, and you can keep chugging along doing that, that's what I would do. Thank the company for the opportunity but tell them you are committed to your startup, they will respect that. And if they don't, you probably didn't want to work there anyway.
On the note of experience. At the job you are being offered, most likely you would gain specific technical experience. But you get hordes of experience from running a startup too. The startup experience tends to be on more of a macro level and you will find it useful in many aspects of your life. Running your own company will force you to put on lots of hats and give you a more complete look at how things fit together on a grander scale.
Not saying that the job experience is not valuable. Just reminding you not to forget about the experience you are already getting at your startup.
Eventually, complacency and failure to innovate will probably kill off Facebook. I know it's hard to look at Facebook now and see the possibility that they will be much less relevant in 10 years. But that will probably happen.
Prodigy, CompuServe, AmericaOnline, Friendster, Myspace and to a certain extent even Yahoo and Microsoft. At one point in time they were all pervasive, disruptive, and dominant. And now they've either gone or are having to pivot into a niche to maintain viability at a fraction of their former glory.
The internet and technology will keep growing. Facebook will get marginalized at some point.
"The experience I could gain at that new company is probably loads more than I could ever get slogging away on my own."
It kind of seems like you've already made up your mind here. If you think that you can get more value out of the job for the time being, don't feel bad about taking it.
I see the big variable that you haven't talked about here is your commitment level to this particular startup. Is it something that you love doing? Or is it just something you are passing time with.
In my experience, I've built startups that I could have jumped ship on. With others, that thought wouldn't have even entered my mind.
So I think the variables here are more than just should I take the job or not. We don't know your situation well enough. My guess is you are already leaning one way though.
It's not impossible, it's just adding another degree of difficulty. I did exactly this in the second half of my twenties. Working on my projects, doing consulting when I had to to support myself and my family. I believe the impetus that drives "family men" to seek shelter in a "normal" job can also drive you to be relentless in making your startup work. More skin in the game.
Also, team comes into play here. Personally. I know that if I wouldn't have had such a wonderful and supporting partner at home, the startup issue would have been a non-starter.
Ok, so there are actually quite a few variables when you are considering. Mainly, the type of T-shirt you want to print on and the type of graphic you want printed.
The three main types of shirt printing are...
Screenprinting - The Old standby. Looks good, washes fairly well. But can get expensive when you get into multiple colors. Also, only higher end houses are going to be able to handle larger resolutions on your graphics.
Direct 2 Garment - This is the new kid on the block. It's essentially an Ink Jet printer that has been hacked to take garment dye. Upside is it prints RIDICULOUSLY high resolution graphics. And you can generally get a small run done for not a ton of cash. Down side is, the house doing the work has to know what they are doing. Poorly cured DTG work will fade almost immediately.
TRANSFER PRINTING - This is like a hybrid of one of the two above methods with the Iron ons you get at office max. Don't hate though, Transfer printing can be awesome. Pretty much every sports team ever uses transfer printing. It makes the graphic stand out (physically) from the shirt.
Find someone local to you. I guarantee there is a hungry local print house that is close to you that would trip over itself for your business right now. The economy has hit printers pretty hard.
I will be happy to discuss your order specifics with you in more detail and point you in the right direction. Full disclosure, I'm from a Garment Industry family and I currently own a T-Shirt company myself. Not sleazy though, as we just print our own stuff for resale and I won't be trying to get you to buy from us :-)
My contact email is in my profile, or we can discuss it right here in the HN Comments section.