Backstage is super configurable, but requires that you build your own developer portal. That generally requires a dedicated team of people at your company to think about dev workflows to support, building plugins, plus hosting/maintenance.
At OpsLevel, we're focused on a much more turnkey solution. We want to get you up and running in under an hour, not weeks / months.
Agreed. A founder should assume any ambiguity in a term sheet will be resolved in the investors favor (since you're very unlikely to walk away from a deal after signed). I preferred more comprehensive term sheets so that we could pin everything down while the investor was still in "courting mode".
Something we did in our later financings was to (very politely) provide an interested investor with a fairly comprehensive (~7 pages) template term sheet that had blanks for the major economic terms, but otherwise fully specified all the details of the proposed deal. This kept things from drifting off "founder friendly" after signing and had the added bonus of making offers easier to compare.
You might enjoy Fred Brook's essay "No Silver Bullet", where he distinguishes between "Accidental Complexity" (basically, complexity created by software engineers when implementing a solution) and "Essential Complexity" (complexity that arises because software is written to solve some real world problem and the world is complex).
I've always thought musical counterpoint and multi-threaded programming have a great number of parallels. Both are fundamentally about setting up independent but interlocking things that need to work together to accomplish a goal without crashing into each other. And I think the first time you experience either done by a real master, it is mind blowing in the same sort of way.
Even more amazing is that Bach (and others as well) could build a fugue while improvising. It's like live coding multi threaded software. Even late in life Bach was given a challenge on the spot to build something from a given set of notes, and the Goldberg Variations are the result (he remembered what he did and wrote it out later). I still love listening to the last thing he ever worked on (a quadruple fugue in the Art Of Fugue) where he died essentially in the middle of writing the piece, the stopping of the music is so stark you feel the death.
I think you might be referring to the Musical Offering.
The Goldberg Variations were after the aria in Anna Magdalena's book.
Also, research suggests that the story of Bach dying before finishing the final fugue in Art of Fugue is inaccurate. An analysis of the paper in the extant manuscript, the tools used to draw the staff lines, and the simple realization that there is no way even Bach could have undertaken such a huge work without deriving the final combination of the fugal subjects before hand, all point to a completion in the year 1747 or 1748, but lost. The fragment that survives is likely to be a rough draft.
I wrote my senior paper in undergrad on this.
In fact the last work completed by the master is believed to be the "Et Incarnatus Est" in second (later) half of the B minor mass.
We're relied on by Github, 37signals, Heroku, Linode, Microsoft, Adobe, and many others, even though we are still a small team of only 18 people.
We're currently hiring across the entire stack: ops engineers, backend & systems engineers, and frontend engineers. We're also hiring many positions into both of our offices -- Toronto and San Francisco. For more info on our jobs, please see:
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We're especially interested in experienced frontend engineers! If you're a skilled JS programmer who feels that B2B software is often overlooked when it comes to UI & UX, we want to talk to you!
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GCC has a noreturn pragma for this sort of thing. It lets you mark functions as never returning, which can in turn help the optimizer generate code leading up to that function's call sites.
I didn't think his IOU solution for founders that either don't take a salary or contribute property made much sense. For that to be fair, you'd have to set a super high interest rate on the loan.
At the same time, I see the difficulty with assigning a concrete value to the shares early on. The angel investment world solves this exact problem using convertible debt. Why not take the same approach with investments-in-kind made by the founders?
If a founder forgoes a salary, why not agree to convert the pay difference relative to the other founders into stock at the time of the first equity financing at the share price negotiated with the VCs?
Yeah I found that part especially wrong too. His article is all about fairness, and it seems especially unfair to me that someone would work and have a huge chunk of compensation deferred with a nontrivial chance the company never pays.
If I work for someone, they need to compensate me right away. This may mean I receive an option grant that is eventually worthless, but at least in that case I would have had an upside to my risk. The IOU has no upside but has the same possibility of worthlessness.
Made up numbers, but say you get 500,000 from investors. And the going rate for engineers is 100,000. Two founders can take a salary and hire two, maybe three, employees. If they can afford not to take a salary, they've doubled their staff size. Since each one of them owns 25% of the company, it may be worth the risk to them. It's obviously not worth the same risk to the first round of employees, who each end up with 2.5% of the company.
in an ideal world, none of the founds will need the money to pay rent or pay for child care etc, they'd all be young guys with no debt living at home.
The fact that one founder may have bills to pay, and him being the only guy having to cash in very early, will beat the morale out of him: he'll be working as an employee. This is also your guy whose tolerance for risk is the lowest precisely because he's got bills to pay. He might as well quit and go work 9-5 for steady pay in that case.
Deferred pay, without equity, is a bad idea. First of all, seasoned people aren't going to work for deferred cash only, knowing that companies rarely pay it back until they're roaring successes. Deferred pay arrangements usually are, "we'll pay you $X when we have the cash on hand" but the problem is that the cash is never truly "on hand"; in a growing business, there's always a better use for the money than paying zero-interest debt to employees. Venture capitalists don't want their infusions to be spent on back salary, and most CEOs want to invest revenues back into the business.
In lieu of equity, deferred pay is a bad deal for the employee: no upside, only downside, and usually on terms that are a lot less creditor-friendly than what banks can negotiate.
A further problem with deferred pay is that when things become difficult, it's not much of a motivator. After a year or two, people assume they're never going to get it back and become resentful. It's better off for them to have equity, where they knew full well they might not be repaid.
If a founder forgoes a salary, why not agree to convert the pay difference relative to the other founders into stock at the time of the first equity financing at the share price negotiated with the VCs?
This is a decent first-order approximation, but for true fairness, the valuation should be set at the time the deferred-payment arrangement is made and should be lower than what is expected from a VC in the future. Because a deal may not happen, the fair valuation when this arrangement is set is lower than the expected VC valuation.
For that to be fair, you'd have to set a super high interest rate on the loan.
Why? Hypothetically someone could take a standard loan and use that. That would be cumbersome, and sometimes impossible, but it wouldn't require a "super high" interest rate.
They both work as hard and they both share the same risks. If they fail, the IOU still applies. One just happen to have more money stashed away.
Is there such a thing as a "standard" interest rate? One of the main factors in determining the rate on a loan is the risk of default. For a newly incorporated company -- that's going to be high.
Both partners might work as hard, but they don't share the same risks. One has put X thousand more into the business, and they should be compensated for that additional investment. The fairest way to do that is to consider what terms you'd find reasonable on an investment of similar risk.
The way I understood Spolsky the IOU was between the founders, i.e. it would even apply if the company went bankrupt. If that is the correct interpretation, they share the same risk.
I re-read the entry and it isn't clear to me if Spolsky thinks the IOU should be there even if the company ceases to exists. Me and my two co-founders had a similiar arrangement, albeit with very small amounts, and after the company died they paid me back the unofficial loan. We were all students and I happened to have some more disposable money for initial investments (under $3000 though).
(Disclosure — I’m an investor.)