meta user
network profile
| bio | website | |
|---|---|---|
| location | Cambridge, United Kingdom | |
| age | 38 | |
| visits | member for | 2 years, 1 month |
| seen | Apr 12 at 8:55 | |
| stats | profile views | 141 |
CTO for a life-science eCommerce company that has scaled from a few people back in 2000 to flotation in 2005 and now turning over $100M a year with 39% PBT.
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Dec 1 |
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Toughest Exercise: Equity Split As usual, referring to Joel Spolsky's answer here: answers.onstartups.com/questions/6949/… |
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Nov 29 |
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Why can't I find any reliable web development help? What am I doing wrong? I use bitbucket myself as it's free for private, but if I didn't mind about whether it was private or not I'd go with github - it's better IMHO. |
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Nov 29 |
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Why can't I find any reliable web development help? What am I doing wrong? +1 for github comment: you'll see those commits flowing in (or not) |
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Nov 24 |
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How much equity should I get for developing a site where the idea isnt mine +1 Fair point Billy. |
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Jun 1 |
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Next steps after launching a social network Added my take on full time jobs. Glad you found my comments useful, but always weigh up the advice you get from others with what you know about your business - remember you know infinitely more about your business than we do. |
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Apr 30 |
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Do I need traditional marketing for a web startup? Marketing effectively is hard. You'd be missing a trick if you shunned traditional channels. There's plenty of marketing material out there - my comments are only from helping to build a billion dollar business. |
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Apr 25 |
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Is my role as non technical guy valuable enough in this case? if you can afford it, keep 100% ownership and hire developers to do the minimum amount of work necessary to demonstrate that this idea will work. Then when you've hit that milestone, move on with bigger and better plans. |
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Apr 13 |
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'Startup' enterprise software application, question about ownership between investors and developers Thanks for your response @user17410. I understand how you've arrived at the valuation. However, what you've done is a valuation of the market, not your company. The idea to target this market isn't worth a $million on its own. Great that you have developers that buy into it - you've a much better chance of winning. Good news on only being 2 months away (I know nothing about your business but I know about estimates - double it :) On that basis, the proposed equity incentive wouldn't be insulting, no. One way to find out :) Good luck. |
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Jan 11 |
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UK Taxation: Do you need to pay tax on revenue gathered from advertisements and donations +1 what he said. |
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Oct 6 |
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What was the one thing that most contributed to your startup success? I'd suggest balancing that with a tip from Seth Godin in his little book 'The Dip' where he talks about how important it is to know when to quit. Sometimes it doesn't pay to keep banging on at something! |
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Oct 5 |
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It's a very new concept and struggling to convince the world in 3 seconds- help? nice answer Joseph |
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Sep 29 |
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As a single founder, is it worth the effort to add a new (novice) co-founder? The reason most successful startups are founded by more than one person is because there are very few people in the world that can do everything well enough to get the business off the ground. Usually someone is technical, but not so savvy marketing-wise, or vice versa, and sometimes people just want to have the support of an experienced entrepreneur to bounce ideas and decisions off of. If you find someone where u feel some sort of creative spark ignite when you're together then go in with them. When you find good partners the product is greater than the sum of the parts. |
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Sep 26 |
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Would Skype's stock buyback plan be as evil if they paid fair market value? Disagree also. The option to buy back at exercise price means the option is worthless to the employee. The company still went to the trouble of setting up the scheme; which can only be construed as them trying to mislead the employee into thinking they had something of worth. Using something contractually worthless as an incentive - that's evil. |
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Aug 11 |
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What are some best practices for managing user feedback? It's a desktop app for the Mac is it? A bit more info on the type of application would help. |
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Aug 10 |
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Where do I find company information for revenue projections? Yes, as you know LinkedIn did IPO recently but their model is very different to Groupon. All they have in common is the internet, really - and there are lots of public internet companies. It's hard to generalise around what level of subscriptions/traffic etc will lead to a successful company as business models leverage that traffic differently and some markets are harder to get into than others. |
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Aug 5 |
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Importance of a Conference and Networking +1 agree. Go and understand what makes affiliate marketers tick, if your proposition to them is pitched right, you could have an army of marketers working for you without breaking the bank. |
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Aug 5 |
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competing with Amazon, how to, the smart approach Funny, all this time I thought Ocado was just Waitrose's online brand... |
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Jul 22 |
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Is iphone/ipad market that saturated? +1 for point 2. |
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Jul 21 |
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Do newly funded startups offer salaries which are comparable to market rate? The vast majority of people employed at startups that may benefit from options etc are not working at Skype/Facebook/Zynga/etc. When something happens in a high-profile startup-success it doesn't mean that's the norm. The practices alleged against Skype and their employee terminations reflect the nature of the companies in question which will always vary depending on the morality of the leadership. |
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Jun 29 |
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Stock options/salary for VP of engineering at series B startup? Further to @Filippo's point, keep an eye on percentage equity, but remember 5% of company A is going to be worse than 1% of company B if company B has a chance of a 10x bigger valuation... |
