I don't pretend to understand this stuff, but the summary seems to be:
When you raise money by selling stock, you give away power in your company in exchange. This is a scheme to retain power by making the stock that you keep more powerful than the one you sell to other people.
Pros: you retain more control. Cons: You might not find people to buy your stock under those terms.
I did a little reading and I think I understand it.
1.So basically it seems like board directors are voted in one of two ways, through an election that includes all of the company's stockholders, and through an election that only includes members of a certain class of stock.
The agreement guarantees that Class F stockholders (founders) will elect one one board member. This director has two votes on the board, while all other members only have one.
For all elections involving other stock holders, the Class F stockholders will have more voting rights. One Class F share has the same voting power as 10 common shares.
The agreement also gives Class F stockholders protective provisions. Basically any action that affects the rights of Class F stockholders will have to be approved by a majority of Class F stockholders. This gives them power over things like mergers and board reorganizations.
Class F shares cannot be sold or transferred to non-founders. If a founder transfers the stock to anyone who is not a Class F stockholder, the shares are converted to Class A shares. Class F shares can be converted to class A shares, and are automatically converted on death. So basically, these special rights are only for founders. The voting rights can't be transferred.
All the talk about vesting just describes what happens if if control of the company changes.. The absence of a cliff means that you get stock no matter how early you leave. Single trigger means that if there is any change of control or ownership, all of your stock vests. You don't need to get fired or resign for a good reason.
The Founders Institute also created a fund for the founders of the companies using this scheme. Company founders own 60% of the fund, and the Founders Institute owns 40%.
2. So if a founder is forced off the board, the company has to pay 100k to the fund.
3. The fund gets the right to buy 3.5% of the company at Series A valuations.
It sounds great for founders, and bad for investors. Basically, founders will need to approve any major company changes, be able cash out immediately on an acquisition, and get stock options at Series A valuations.
This is much bigger thing. Automated theorem provers operate in (relatively) neat domain.
Biology, on the contrary, is huge mess. Billions years of evolution created a hell of complicated systems. This domain just screams for automated analysis.
Even just doing AI on some data would be cool. Doing wet experiments ordered by Prolog solver and feeding results back to it is just awesome.
It isn't a horrible idea. Using a ready made framework all the time without regard if it's right for the job is a horrible idea.
For some apps which have a certain level of complexity and require some extra flexibility, you end up wasting more time fighting the framework than getting the job done.
It helps if you have a well defined standard in place, for python, that means WSGI. Coupled with good libraries, it's hard to beat.
Right, but that's not "writing a framework", it's "using existing libraries in conjunction with one another". There's no real "magic", directory layout rules, etc.
Maybe you end up writing a couple scripts to tie them together or something, but it's hardly a framework. And in many cases, yes, it is a better choice than a framework. And still a better choice than writing your own framework.
Erm, that's my opposite opinion, I guess. My (attempted) argument is that one should not write their own framework unless doing so as an exercise in learning. In any other case, using existing frameworks or using the "roll your own library mix tape" strategy is far more efficient.
Basically, I'm saying if you're using a language which has mature frameworks and/or mature libraries which could be forged into an ad-hoc framework (templating, serving, ORM, etc.) it is terrible advise to tell people "just write your own".
Only in the case that you've considered all existing (relevant) options and determined none of them meet your use case (and none can be minimally altered to do so) should you consider writing your own. Anything else is a waste of time and effort.
Right, your new rule is, write you own framework/library if necessary, otherwise use what's there. That's much better than your original rule which ruled out any use of frameworks as no frameworks could ever have been created.
But Im' still not happy :) I'm sure a lot of popular frameworks were created without any necessity, simply because they were fun to make. Some turned out to have qualities that nobody (including its creator) would have been able to spell out beforehand.
Seriously, just install smarty and do it yourself. Then somebody can always do a basic edit to the templates and you don't have to weight the merits of the 10000X different frameworks against eachother and get back to Making Money!
