Yep - I found lots of the grammar on the site jarring, and little things like 10$/month - the convention is $10/month, and it looks really odd. You should get a couple of hours of a copywriter's time to go over it, there's lots of little quirks.
There's no requirement to or expectation that they will be. Papers are not required to present any kind of balance, as long as what they say is broadly true (external pluralism), for a given value of true. The broadcast media (the free-to-air ones) are required to be demonstrably internally pluralistic, to show a variety of sources and viewpoints within their output - and that applies across BBC, ITV, Ch4 and Channel 5, but not Sky News; goes back to when Radio came on stream in the 1930s.
Hahaha I had one of those yesterday. My profile lists my company I started for side projects, then my role as a specialist at my actual employer. I got an email trying to find out if I was interested in more jobs like {{founded_company + specialist_role + employer_name}} all run together.
I think that's kind of right - it's the explicit awareness of hierarchy or other structures that works. (I'd argue that actually you can have hierarchy-less (sp?) organisations, but they require particular consideration - but you'll still overlay other assemblages - social hierarchies or whatever, on top of it. I did a bit responding to the Tony Hsieh email from our perspective as a company that's trying to implement Holarchy right now: http://blog.granttree.co.uk/post/117079306181/zappos-two-poi...
Ricardo Semler - Maverick is a good one for non heirarchal approaches.
The AES case study of holarchy is v interesting.
Swombat's blog (easily findable!) is a trove of material on startups and moving from corporate to startup, as are the Granttree and Escape The City blogs.
Hah, glad it's not just me. It's also the thing I hit if I'm trying to think of what I was doing/am idle for a moment... typing 'news.' just seems to flow from my fingers if they're unoccupied.
This is the mechanic story all over:
Guy takes his car to a garage because it keeps breaking down, and the mechanic leans in and listens to the engine for a minute. He goes and gets a hammer and listens to the engine again, and then raps sharply on the engine casing. The engine goes back into sync and stops breaking down.
The mechanic says "that'll be £500, please." The guy's outraged: "But all you did was tap it!"
Mechanic replies "it was a pound for the tap, and £499 for knowing where to tap."
Really? I mean, that represents astonishingly bad value for a bunch of reasons. The first is that that's not SEIS covered, because it vastly reduces (by 70%) the risk exposure of the capital, and consequently the %. Especially if you'll include video games tax credits on thus back end that let you stretch that runway. Beyond that, you've also not used the full SEIS value -£150k, so again, shot yourself in there foot. This wouldn't be typical of valuations that I see working with startups, it's far more in the order of 10-17.5% for £150k (with SEIS coverage). Gaming is obviously it's own beast, but the same rules on making the investment tax efficient for the investor apply, and I'm surprised anyone gets any investment with ought SEIS any more.
With that in mind - advice is always to raise as high as you can on angel, because it's covered for the investor, and you can only do it once.
There's so much that doesn't quite gel about this story. He was trading penny stocks when he was 9? He went off to read high finance books as a result, and then successfully and consistently applied them? What on earth (and who) was he tutoring at 9? And as you say, the returns to do that would be pretty phenomenal.
It's hard to say more without knowing what you're buying a white label of, but:
Licensing/volume fees
Support structures - what are they responsible for?
Documentation - what have they got?
System specification - details!
Hosting - are they providing it, or are you installing it yourself! Whois responsible for the rebranding and design?
That's some of the stuff that bit us when we were white labelling a crowd funding platform.m
I'd probably go even further than that - you can have, by all accounts, a reasonably healthy lifestyle while still eating mcdonalds, the same isn't true of cigarettes. There's still SOME utilitarian benefit of fast food, even if marginal. Cigarettes are basically the only consumer product that, if used as intended, cause you intrinsic harm. (That I can think of)
That wouldn't particularly change under the system that I'm proposing, idt. (on the back of a fag packet admittedly)- legal protection and the payments mechanism aren't intrinsically linked - most of the consumer protection with cc came long after the cards had been introduced. If you had an overall limit then the thief couldn't go over that, and a similar mechanism could/would exist - it'd probably be a product differentiation, in fact.