Google. Find their blog, usually it'll have a contact email, send your elevator pitch. This method has been highly successful for when I'm doing PR for Phone Halo.
Do the math on what x% is in dollars based on your premoney evaluation. Give him the note for that amount and treat him as if he were a friends and family investor.
Good idea but this would require us to wait till we raise funding, and therefore have a valuation. We are wondering if there is a way to resolve this right now so that it doesn't complicate an already complicated fundraising process.
Have you pitched any VC's or angels? What premoney are you giving them?
If you don't have a premoney, then cut him a fair salary for the time he worked in a convertible note. The convertible note will be the optimal way to have a nice looking cap table.
I just suggest that you deal with this matter quickly while everyone is in a good mood. Success in a business after someone leaves can be dangerous...
You're paying yourself? I would highly suggest keeping as much cash in the business as possible and put off paying yourself for as long as possible. You'll suffer now but thank yourself later. Get entrepreneurial on how to score free rent and food.
Scoring free rent and food sounds like almost as much work as the startup itself.
I guess if you're in a college town, you could just pretend to be a student and attend student club meetings for the free pizza. I don't know how to handle the rent. You could always seduce girls, I guess. But that seems time consuming. And if you can score free food and seduce girls already, maybe your youth would be better spent that way rather than in a startup?
Unfortunately that doesn't really work for us. We do have some minimal costs - it would be great if we could live for free but that's not going to happen right now. I think even PG says that the money they give to companies is mostly to cover living expenses for a few months. Anyways, the question is how a founder in the earliest of stages takes money out for personal expenses when they need to.
if you have created something that people will go out of their way to pirate, congratulations. Piracy should be the least of your concerns. Focus on getting as many users as possible.
The survey gains general statistics about loss and then is geared to help us fine tune our marketing. I am hoping that seeing some real world process of a company trying to fine tune their marketing will help other HNers fine tune their marketing as well
True, but the second half of the questions require me to know exactly what a PhoneHalo is / does, as well as some specifics about pricing. So I did have trouble answering those, which may skew your data.
Having said that, I generally don't lose stuff, and I don't have a smartphone, so I'm hardly target market.
He chose the safe play rather than risking it on the company he decided to devote his life to. The numbers show that he made the wrong choice, hence a mistake.
Thats like saying I chose to play it safe and not play the lottery rather than buy a lottery ticket every week. One week my numbers win and that shows I made the wrong choice?
There are so many variables that he doesn't have control over that if he took the bigger options he just would have been gambling. It is flawed logic to look at the outcome of an event that has so much variability and hidden factors and say that someone made the wrong choice. I would bet that if he was faced with the same situation now, knowing the outcome of this past event, he would still make the same choice because the smart choice is to not make wild gambles.
