I think that founders stock before a venture financing should be subject to the same general vesting terms as one would expect after a venture financing. A typical vesting schedule is four year vesting with a one year cliff. This means that 25% of the shares will vest one year from the vesting commencement date, with 1/48 of the total shares vesting every month thereafter, until the shares are completely vested after four years. The vesting commencement date can be the date of issuance of the shares, or an earlier date, in order to give the founder vesting credit for time spent working on the company prior to incorporation and/or issuance of the shares.

From Yokum Taku’s Startup Company Lawyer blog.

Spent some time today trying to get various legal and accounting issues taken care of before we start letting people try out our private beta.

Ask PG: YC Founders over 30 yrs old
46 points by dannyr 7 hours ago | 33 comments

I’m curious to know how many YC companies with founders over 30 yrs old have been funded.

We hear so much about founders right out of college. I also wonder how much of a factor is age in selecting companies.

40 points by pg 7 hours ago | link

There are quite a lot of founders over 30. I don’t know exactly how many because we don’t keep track of ages. The sharp falloff is around 35, but we’ve had a handful of founders over 40. None over 50 though.

From a post on Hacker News by user dannyr. PG stands for Paul Graham. YC stands for Y Combinator, Paul Graham’s entrepreneurial ‘not-an-incubator’ venture program for early-stage startups.

I’m about to turn 49, and I plan to apply to Y Combinator  early next year. Though our chances are slim, I think it’d be fun to skew their age distribution a little.

Killing the troll isn’t easy, but you have to do it if you want to monetize your site.

Trustworthiness, transparency, credible authority, lots of high-value content, and just plain old decency are your best weapons.

Everything on your site needs to show that you can be trusted. Real contact information. Showing your photograph. Displaying seals for anti-hacker technology and the Better Business Bureau on your shopping cart. FAQs that actually answer questions. Clear, reassuring calls to action.

So let’s declare war on the trolls. Be extraordinarily trustworthy. Show your value. Put your customers first. Keep your promises.

The troll is tough and hard to kill. But with dedication and commitment, we can chase him off to go wreck somebody else’s business.

from The #1 Conversion Killer in Your Copy (And How to Beat It) by Sonia Simone on CopyBlogger

If you build it, congratulations, but don’t expect too much. If you build it, market it, support it, monitor its publicity, and keep improving it, then they will come, slowly, in fives and tens. Each new subscription is proof that you’re getting somewhere. The trick is ensuring constant growth, and that takes hard work.

Finding the right price points, attracting your target market, writing a blog they read, speaking at events they attend, supporting your current customer-base 24/7, adding features as you see fit, all of this is hard work. It’s usually a lot harder than the programming challenges.

You have to assume that anything you’re putting out there will have some success. Success typically means a number of paying customers, who you must support and communicate with. It’s not just writing an app, it’s attracting a market, supporting customers, dealing with enquiries, writing blog posts, talking to technology news sites, partnering with complimentary applications, handling feature requests. All of that is hard, but you have to plan for it if you’re assuming success, and if you’re not assuming success then what are you doing?

From Patience and hard work by Des Tranynor on Contrast’s always excellent blog.

Even if I could find all the relevant official records digitized on the Internet, would that be enough? No! Conducting genealogical research isn’t just getting the dates and places and full names for vital events; it’s about the quest and the thrill of “the find.”

I want to walk the fields my ancestors plowed (assuming they haven’t been paved). I want to spend time sitting under a tree at the edge of a battlefield where my ancestor fought and perhaps died. I want to spend time at the cemetery, taking a moment to appreciate the lives of those who put loved ones in the ground there.

I swear I am not a romantic about this. Learning about reality is much more powerful and moving. So take my advice, don’t get wrapped up in how many names you collect for your database. Take the time to make some real discoveries: the awe and appreciation for lives that led to you.

From Sharon Tate Moody’s article “It takes details to bring your ancestors to life” in the Tampa Tribune, May 24th, 2009.

There’s no use going to a show if you don’t know why. Answers like, “because our competitors are there,” or “because it’s on our calendar,” or even “because I think we should,” don’t cut it. (Remember your department has a mission.) There’s a plethora of reasons why a company would want to exhibit at a show:

* write sales orders
* generate leads for future sales
* research the competition
* spot trends
* generate awareness and visibility within the industry
* build our mailing list with quality names
* find better or cheaper suppliers
* build rapport with current customers
* get press
* generate excitement around a new product introduction
* get additional partners
* recruit staff

From Steve Blank, Going to Trade Shows Like It Matters

At NGS, I thought we managed to generate awareness, build rapport with current (registered) customers, get press, get additional partners, and build our mailing list with quality names. We did many of the other things he suggests too. But I still need to work on going to trade shows with specific objectives and measuring the ROI in realistic ways.

The social technologies we see in use today are fundamentally panoptical - the architecture of participation is inherently an architecture of surveillance.

In the age of social networks we find ourselves coming under a vast grid of surveillance - of permanent visibility. The routine self-reporting of what we are doing, reading, thinking via status updates makes our every action and location visible to the crowd. This visibility has a normative effect on behavior (in other words we conform our behavior and/or our speech about that behavior when we know we are being observed).

Joshua-Michéle Ross, The Digital Panopticon, via O’Reilly Radar.

The author uses a fear-inducing analogy to explore what we risk and potentially give up when we casually share truths about ourselves on Facebook, Twitter, et al. I don’t see things in quite so ominous terms, but the article is thought-provoking nonetheless.