Seems a bit comical that the article claims this to be the first disappearing photo app. I created and launched one myself a year before Snapchat started...
The normal way for start founders to receive equity, is only from one or more of these 3 things:
- For hours worked, based on the vesting and usually the hours must be beyond the cliff or you get nothing.
- If you built a crucial part of the IP that the company needs to buy from you with equity.
- Cash invested up front - less common.
He fulfilled none of those. Not even close to being a cofounder. Ideas aren't included among those.
Have you seen their shareholder agreement? Does one even exist?
Vesting is quite common in the EU, but only when it is agreed upon by all parties. If you're founding a business on equal equity based on the capital deposited you get those shares up front, any additional shares emitted subject to vesting/shareholder agreements, payments and so on.
What you agree on matters, not what you later think you should have agreed on.
Anyway, I note the case has been settled and that you either have some hidden knowledge about this case or that your position is at odds with reality as currently on display.
It's worth noting that you rarely end up with more than -1 or -2 votes. Write a single popular comment and it more than makes up for it.
I'm not sure what your comment about "people linking to old comments" means. Either you stand by your comments or you don't.
Edit. The comment I replied was by the user "compare"[1] and said the following:
In this case, it was people linking to old comments, to try to make the attacks more personal, and attempting vote brigading.
I wish we could ban most of the top active commenters on hacker news. They get controlling and territorial.
One could argue that the most valuable feedback for a writer is on comments that are rght on the boundary between their viewpoint and alternate viewpoints. Culturally, it would be more valuable if people replied with their reason for disagreement.
Downvotes are clearly intended for moderation (visibility change of font), but are easy to misuse for passive debate.
Situation: someone accidentally copy-pastes personal data into a comment. Someone else replies, "you probably should remove that". The first person can no longer remove it.
I find it annoying when people delete posts as well, but there are valuable reasons to do it.
If he was banned because some newbie (or anybody else) demanded it I'd happily join him in exile. Though I very highly doubt that would ever happen. And I'm at odds with Thomas on plenty of subjects, that doesn't mean there should be demands to squelch those that we disagree with.
I would not even want to see people banned for asking other people to be banned. It's just totally against the grain of the community. I read back some more through 'compare's' comments and he did indeed have a run-in with Thomas so you may be on to something there.
You really need to stop the personal attacks and trying to raise a downvote brigade against my comments, just because we disagreed about a law and culture topic.
I wish the site admins would place a clear written policy against these and other personal attacks next to every comment box.
I don't understand why you're coming at this from a US vs EU angle. I've worked in both as well, have had a company in the US, have had a company in Canada as well as several in Europe.
Agreements tend to be legally binding on both sides of the Atlantic, if my experience is any guide then the US is much stronger on contracts and agreements than Europe, but apparently we we're not going to agree on that.
What matters is that we're talking about a very specific case, not just your experience or general matters. And that in that specific case which the linked article talks about there was more than just smoke about there being 3, not 2 co-founders to snapchat and that one of them got unfairly cut out of the deal.
What the US norm is in such cases is not relevant, if you agree on a three way split then that is what you should do. If someone contributes to your start-up in a non-material but essential way then you can decide to reward them or not, but once you've made a commitment towards sharing in the proceeds you can't later backpedal on that.
And there is nothing European about that. Case in point: this lawsuit is going down in the US.
You seem to be really stuck on this point. EU economies suffer because we take contracts extremely literally?
I don't know why you would bring this subject up in several unrelated treads but that's something you can probably answer better than I can. This thread has reached enough levels for me.
You're right, of course, but if young and stupid entrepreneurs say something like "We'll split the company evenly between us" and any semblance of work happens then there will eventually come a day when they'd told that the law does not treat that statement as a code comment. Triply so if they are just smart enough to cut themselves and memorialize their agreement on paper.
While I might agree that contributing a simple idea to a startup isn't generally worth a stake in it, driving that startup with a broad, complex vision over its development certainly is.
Unfortunately, I've met founders that equate the latter with the former, and think it's fine to steal off with "ideas" that people have worked on for years because "well, ideas have no value, only implementation does." If the "idea" is several paragraphs (or even pages) long, and includes comprehensive implementation details, it has value. No question.
Now, SnapChat, I agree, there isn't really much going on there beyond a one-sentence pitch. But not all ideas are that simple, and the complex ones are given inherent value by their complexity.
I don't think it really matters at all what exactly you did if there was an agreement that you get a third of the equity.
Reggie's mistake was not getting it in contractual form. However, clearly the law still takes clearly communicated pacts between friends somewhat seriously, as it forced Snapchat to settle.
It got great traction and decent press coverage, in fact I was a bit surprised when journalists decided to go with a nudity angle. In the end I never pursued it further, due to another startup I was working on at the time.
Its true that it's not the idea but the execution that matters for any startup. However in this case, snapchats virality was in the idea(even if it has been done before). The execution side, vs photo apps like Instagram, was simpler and less complicated. Moreover, he was involved in the initial development of the app. He deserved better.
The effectiveness of the relationship between investors and startups in SV is built on upon being upstanding and not being overly manipulative. Founder/Investor agreements that are born from the manipulation of unexperienced founders always should be EXPECTED to turn out badly.
There's a child-like expectation that once the deal is signed or agreement is made that it's over. It never is, that's just the beginning. If you're expecting that everything is finalized as soon as an agreement is made, regardless of the conditions, then you're simply bad at business and taking risks that you haven't yet realized.
(Of course this isn't true in Europe. They love taking contracts extremely literally, and their economies suffer enormously for it.)
So many accelerators behave wildly unprofessionally and inappropriately for the space that they're in.
Perhaps all that's needed is more high-visibility guidelines like what YC is doing now. Perhaps we need better platform for evaluating investors from the founders perspective, instead of networks that really only care about evaluating startups.
Either way, the situation seems to be getting worse, with the continued explosion of accelerator programs around the world. I hope we find an effective solution.
No, that's insane. Investors commonly invest in multiple competitors at once. Not to mention that this is a huge security vulnerability to have this stuff floating around the investor's office and on their personal computers.
Correct. The solution is usually that they'll just create special functions for doing numeric comparisons, that accept an adjustable epsilon margin of error, to use instead of the built-in numeric comparison functions.
There're a lot of silly myths about investment software on hacker news / reddit. Truth is that the code is usually much more hastily written, but with more tests or redundant systems implemented to cross validate results.
The idea that precise decimal types will be used throughout the systems is a bit silly. All the data typically will be going though off the shelf machine learning models, all of which just used plain floating types.
If you do end up finding a way to make a break up with non-technical founders go smoothly, without them running your name through the mud or threatening to blackmail you, then please do let us know. Not sure it's possible.
Was really hard to figure out what in that article has anything to do with "design". If anyone is as confused as I was, it seems that "design thinking" is something totally different:
I was shown some of the materials students made (in full Stanford courses, not in the 4-hour introductory workshop :) ), and they were amazing.
I observed that one thing Americans have over students in my home country/culture is, they're way more likely to learn how to make awesome presentations :) .
"This approach differs from the scientific method, which begins with thoroughly defining all the parameters of the problem in order to create a solution. Design thinking starts without preconceived problem definitions and solutions, in order to discover hidden parameters and alternate optimized paths to the goal."
Airbnb experimented with a different approach by going out and taking better pictures themselves, rather than the using the preconceived notion that startups should never do things that do not scale.
was thinking the same thing ..how about a hypothesis and an experiment to test it :)
it seems to me design and scientific method need not be separate at all...
i worked with some good designers at ziba on my last project and they were effectively following a scientific method - hypothesis for design, rapid implementation, then testing with users, observe and repeat. ( was fun too )
Design Thinking is the new MBA, but coming from a design background. I'm not that fond of it since I just call it "good business brainstorming" or "good problem solving."
Thanks for this. Design trends really are detached from any sensible reality. They're turning good designs into bad designs whenever a site tries to modernize themselves to match these trends.
Here's my rule for web app design: 90% of the page, by area, should be somehow derived from the app's dynamic content, versus static filler content from the designer, no matter how pretty the filler is.
Second rule: Designers, stop calling your OWN apps sexy or beautiful. Would you walk up to someone that you just met, and tell them that you're beautiful while they're looking directly at you? What the f## are you designers thinking?
Great concept. One feature request: Better calculations for cities with Bi-modal price distributions.
Certain cities have a extremely bi-modal distributions of pricing. I.e. they can support both the "broke artist" lifestyle, and the "upper middle class" lifestyle. Two separate cost distributions. If you try to take the mean or median of these cities, you'll end up either arbitrarily landing on one of the distributions, or a nonsense number in the middle.
A good example is Manhattan. For example, pizza can actually be cheaper in Manhattan than Sofia. In Manhattan, the broke artist lifestyle of living with multiple roommates who barely know each other, all sharing a rent controlled apartment for a few hundred dollars a month is more socially acceptable and much more common. Just taking prices from the realtor-controlled apartment websites is a poor reflection of reality. Almost no one except the richer consultants bothers with a full-time coworking desk in either city. In this case, Manhattan can actually cost less than Sofia.
So, I think the "broke artist" price distributions would better reflect what a remote working nomad would be looking for, instead of the "upper middle class" prices.
And likewise with temperature. I grew up in Iowa where it fluctuates from over 100F (40C) to below 0F (-20C) but that doesn't give it the same climate as San Francisco's near-constant 70F (20C).
For that matter, colorize high temperatures in red as well.
Definitely needs something like this. I mean Brasov and Timisoara have a cost of living of about $2000 - now that would mean you'll live at least an upper-middle-class lifestyle.
For one person you can probably get by with about $1000 easily.
most street corners in sofia have a slice for ~ 1$ (1.2lv up to 2 lv) i've heard friends recommend the pizza around NDK & Vitosha buss stop but i haven't tried it personally
The normal way for start founders to receive equity, is only from one or more of these 3 things:
- For hours worked, based on the vesting and usually the hours must be beyond the cliff or you get nothing.
- If you built a crucial part of the IP that the company needs to buy from you with equity.
- Cash invested up front - less common.
He fulfilled none of those. Not even close to being a cofounder. Ideas aren't included among those.