I just transferred the last few of my godaddy domains to Namecheap.
I've used namecheap as dns host for a while without problems.
Transfers are $6.99 with SOPASucks coupon code.
SOPA finally made me get off my lazy ass and do something about consolidating all of them to namecheap.
The quote from the article The reality is that there seems to be a significant deficit of modern, high quality, software solutions in many, if not most, markets and furthermore, there is also a deficit of talented developers and designers to capitalize on and satisfy these markets.
You could have said that about the dotcom bubble and be correct at that time. But the gold rush analogy fits very well for that scenario with the benefit of hindsight.
Any scenario including the current startup rush could be made to fit into either one of the options presented.
The reality is:
a) currently we are not in an economic slump wrt startup funding
b) there will be companies which will make it out of the gold rush looking like visionaries (ala Levis Jeans).
c) there will be companies that have attracted significant capital which will go bust.
That is market economics with nothing unusual.
The determining factor would be the % of the companies funded which will survive and thrive. I would bet towards a high percentage of busts than winners.
And that doesn't make me a genius, i am just stating the obvious.
With the benefit of hindsight, though without looking up any numbers to back up this claim, I'd be willing to bet that during the dot.com era the real demand for software and web development was, in fact, much lower than it is today, but the hype around the potential to 'strike it rich' just as great (perhaps greater).
I'm sure there will be a high percentage of busts, that is for the most part true for any entrepreneurial ventures. I will say though that today's situation isn't the same as the past. During the dot.com days one of the RIM founders stated at a conference I attended, that many companies were being funded almost purely on the number of comp sci. and engineering graduates they had hired.
Sure, it's still a rush. There is more hype than realism in the air, but certainly not nearly as much, and the opportunities are far more tangible this time. Make no mistake, gold rush or land rush, hard work is typically a necessary condition to succeed, but my argument is that success is a realistic achievement, given willingness, talent and drive. No amount of that will manage to squeeze gold from a tapped vein.
Sure. But what's the relative busts-to-winners proportion here versus before or after the startup rush? Do you think the number of busts will be higher than, say, just post-dot-com-boom?
Cause is usually defined as willful failure or refusal to perform duties that continues after notice and an opportunity to cure, misappropriation or misuse of company trade secrets, commission of a felony or other action involving moral turpitude, etc. and "good reason" is typically defined as material reduction in compensation or duties, relocation to a remote area, etc.
When a company decides to terminate an early engineer because the 5% they agreed at the start is deemed too high for an engineer, usually the reason given is 'non-performance'. Even though the engineer is performing his engineering duties.
Does a company need to prove that the engineer failed to perform and document it? or is it usually the company's word against the engineer's? What stands up in the court of law as 'failure to perform duties'?
It is very hard for a company to prove willful failure to perform duties when an engineer is actually executing on assigned projects, or at least attempting in good faith to execute. Engineers who have contractual protection against termination without cause are usually well-protected against arbitrary terminations on "non-performance" grounds and the company has to do a lot more than loosely assert (in "he said / she said" fashion) that someone's performance comes up short. Moreover, in most cases, the contract clause will specify that, in order to effect a termination on this ground, the company must give notice to the employee specifying why the performance is inadequate and give the employee a window within which to cure any defects in performance. This makes it doubly difficult to terminate someone on non-performance grounds because the charges have to be detailed and there will always be an argument about whether any deficiencies were cured if the employee is actually trying to perform all assigned duties. The company can try to document such cases all it wants but will normally hold a losing hand in trying to prove "cause" on that ground in such cases.
The Zynga cases are different, however, because the employees being squeezed in those cases are almost certainly pure at-will employees who have no contractual protection against being terminated without cause. Without the contractual protection, such employees can be terminated for pretty much any reason in the normal case and, if "non-performance" is cited as the reason, the company does not need to prove anything to back this up. "Non-performance" in such cases is often nothing more than a label used to rationalize a decision made on who knows what ground (e.g., on the ground that the company just wants to get someone's potentially valuable stock back before it vests).
If you had clear reasoning that you was dismissed for a reason other than failure to perform duties, then you would have cause to sue.
FTA two people already retained council, settled and still got to keep a portion of their stock.
What Zynga is worried about is that if they're going to be publicly valued at $1 billion, the guy who owns 5% of stock because he was there from day one is going to land $50 million and walk.
I imagine that the biggest problem with IPO's for companies like Zynga (especially if they're acting douche to their employees) is that they risk losing a lot of employees. Either selling up stock to get the cash, or simply retiring to live off dividends and slow-stock sale tactics.
More often, startups fire employees under the disguise of performance. I am not sure what constitutes non-performance but it has been used countless times as an excuse for getting back the unvested stock options.
You hit the nail on the head. In a bad economy/tech market like 2001, the recruiters were rude, unreachable and acted like Gods.
After 9/11 2001, a recruiter sent me resume of few other candidates vying for the same job and asked me to write a page describing how I am better than those candidates.
Now, the tables have turned, we developers consider recruiters as dirt bags.
I have no doubt that the tide will turn again. We just don't know when.
"Next time it could be you" is not the only or even best motivation for practicing compassion and tolerance. I have been cold called by inept recruiters and hired by companies with barely competent ones. Nurturing contempt for them does nothing good, in particular it does nothing good for you. It's also a missed opportunity: when a niche in the economy attracts ineptitude, that tells you there's a broken system possibly worth analyzing.
I encountered recruiters who were a bit short with me in that era, but I encountered more who had a who had a different sort of desperation than they do now. Third-party recruiters rely on a steady stream of jobs coming available so they can collect placement fees. In 2002, they faced a real pinch in what jobs were open and in what companies would pay to both developers and recruiters. Many recruiters went without work as they didn't have any jobs to place people in.
I talked with one recruiter about a job that paid about 1/3rd what I made just 2 years before. I said "has it really gotten that bad?" He opened up about the situation as he really didn't expect me to go after the job as it paid far less than what I was making, even back then. IIRC, it was the only job he had open at the time and rates had hit bottom, so he couldn't even find anyone willing to take it. Fortunately, things turned around for both of us.
I've read the chapter in the book lean startup and again here. I fail to grasp the Minimum viability in that chapter.
Drew built a product with considerable reverse engineering before he got any feedback, tried explaining to the vcs and investors without much luck. It all worked when he created a video.
Where in the mvp in that? May be I am too thick to understand but for me this is a case of retrofitting the story to match your theory.
Dropbox had a great product that people loved with a better video. No, they did not use feedback loop to pivot and all that mvp stuff.
I must agree. MVP is getting thrown around and twisted like "pivot" did a few months ago. A video is not an MVP, because it's neither viable nor a product.
A video is great and, if done right, it's immensely useful at quickly explaining the value of the product your're building. It is not a product, though.
An MVP for dropbox would be something like a directory with a git repo that auto-commits everything and has a cron job push to & pull from a remote server every minute.
<< First, a definition: the minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort. ...
Second, the definition's use of the words maximum and minimum means it is decidedly not formulaic. It requires judgment to figure out, for any given context, what MVP makes sense.
By that definition, it feels like a video could definitely qualify as an MVP? It allowed them to validate important learnings about customers with the least effort... not so different from an AdWords MVP smoke test:
In any case, it sounds like Drew programmed enough to create a prototype but not enough for it to have the polish required for a user to be able see that it "work[ed] seamlessly" or "worked just like magic." So in that sense, the video did allow him to exert less effort and still test his customer hypothesis.
<< First, a definition: the minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort. ...
Second, the definition's use of the words maximum and minimum means it is decidedly not formulaic. It requires judgment to figure out, for any given context, what MVP makes sense."
In other words, the definition is so broad and stretchable that any successful effort can be retroactively called an MVP, just like all successful software projects are claimed to be "agile" in some fashion (or lean or whatever the latest fad is).
MVP, pivot, Lean Startup(TM) - all this sounds like something tailored primarily to sell books and seminars, not what successful startups do. Now that Drew is successful, I am sure what he did will be held up as an example of the latest faux methodology. I am waiting for the Eric Ries post that portrays Steve Jobs as a "lean startup" visionary.
According to the article, Drew got feedback in parallel with his product development: "In parallel with their product development efforts, the founders wanted feedback from customers about what really mattered to them."
The video was just a prototype so that he could give a demo over video, and get feedback on that: "The challenge was that it was impossible to demonstrate the working software in a prototype form. The product required that they overcome significant technical hurdles; it also had an online service component that required high reliability and availability. To avoid the risk of waking up after years of development with a product nobody wanted, Drew did something unexpectedly easy: he made a video."
It's a pretty clear case of an MVP. He build the minimum needed to ask people for feedback (in this case, not even a product but just a demo/video). The strong customer response to the demo/video that he then received validated his product-market fit before he invested a lot of time turning his demo into a fully working product.
The product looks nearly done in the video. It was already in private beta. Every feature that I knowingly use in Dropbox today was shown in that video.
IIRC Drew applied to YC in early 2007 and had some working code by that time. The change dates on files in video are March 2008, so he's been working at this for at least a year.
I can only guess but you definitely are not in your 30's yet.
I held the same exact sentiments in my 20's. Then I got to my 30s and I realized I haven't done all that I wanted to do. I can slowly see time slipping away and 50 is not too far.
I am afraid 50 isn't enough, time wastes too fast.
PS: I once made this snarky comment at my office water cooler If someone guaranteed I will drop dead at 50 without any health issues, I would take it any day over living with pills and dieting...and then a man in his 50s with a pace maker walked by to fill water. I felt incredibly stupid to generalize life for every one else.
