>>2) What ratio of them fall into the "married with kids" category?
There were at least 14 founders from our batch (W2010) that were married or engaged and about 6 of those had kids. I think there were about 65 total founders.
There was a great session at Google IO about developer success stories within the Google apps marketplace. It is well worth a watch if you are looking for ways to make money within Gmail (particularly if your product targets businesses/business users).
This post suggests that YC is in some way incompatible with the idea of doing what is best for your customers. It's a strange conclusion based on the significant amount of public evidence to the contrary.
Some ideas are probably compatible with a lifestyle business but not with a VC-backed business. Without any details there's no way to know whether that is the case here.
Why not just use the standard four year vesting with a one year "cliff" for the full 5-10%? If your co-founder isn't a good fit or isn't hitting milestones you can part ways early and retain all or most of the stock.
Time-based vesting implies full-time participation. In my case (and probably a lot of other cases), we are both part-time until the product gets traction. Then we will take the risk of going all-in.
If I tie the vesting to milestones instead of time, I should be able to fairly compensate the other person's part-time efforts without walking down the 'you aren't working enough, your shares aren't fully vested' path if/when we divorce.
Why not base the first 1% or so on an hourly vesting schedule? So if he is working part time he can rack the up the hours all year or however long it takes. Make the milestones 'hours worked'
>>I haven't been able to figure out why it is delivered as a browser extension, though
This came largely from alpha user feedback. Those folks told us that they wanted access to the question stream, but didn't want another login to manage to access Twitter data. So, we started with the extension which made it easy to be notified when there were new questions.
We are working on a web app as well as integration into some of the major Twitter clients and social media dashboards. Eventually we'll get to mobile (another highly requested platform). That way folks will have lots of options as to how they access our tools.
I think this is a great example of why you should look to your customers for inspiration but not necessarily specific direction.
Although your users might not want 'another login to manage twitter data' they also probably wouldn't want every startup in this space to go the same route and create a browser extension you can have unlimited logins, you can't run unlimited browser extensions.
I would put the web app on top priority as for now I'm put off installing yet another browser plugin.
When that happens it is usually a conflict with another extension. If you email me with the other extension you may be running we can do our best help out (joe@inboxq.com).
Thanks, Alex. That is definitely something we are aware of and are adding a "mute" button so you can block the type of users that you are talking about. We are also building a quality filter specifically to address that type of behavior (ie so those folks just don't show up in the first place).
There were at least 14 founders from our batch (W2010) that were married or engaged and about 6 of those had kids. I think there were about 65 total founders.