That may be the best quote I've read in awhile. I've convinced that profit is a function of creating happiness, both with your customers and within your company.
You're exactly right. They paid the third founder $700,000 to go away after their Series A. Smart, but I actually didn't respect him leaving his friends out to dry and forcing them into awkward conversations with their investors. I guess that lesson is make sure your founding team is committed before you dole out the stock certificates :).
I agree that liquidity event is a more accurate term than "selling the company". If you are looking for something less formal, you can use "cashing out".
While we're on the topic of language: Parker, you may want to read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallelism_(grammar) -- the incongruity between "are" and "it's" in your sentence ain't right.
Their 'additional scrutiny' concluded that I was a student even though I had massive amounts of documentation pointing to the exact opposite conclusion. It is their job to investigate extra-ordinary situations. Suggesting that I needed a student visa was just plain wrong.
I wouldn't worry too much about it -- most every foreign-national other than me has had no problems getting in for the program. I think I just ran into a couple bad border officials. Perhaps I was even over-transparent the first time. By having so much documentation prepared, maybe I made myself look suspicious.
I did an internship last year in Washington so I drove back-n-forth a lot with my friends and other students from UBC and SFU. Boy... all of us hate dealing with US immigration officers.
Earlier this year, I had to go to US for a business trip. Things haven't changed. They're still the same Fat, Oily haired, snobbish, and stupid border officers.
I remember couple months ago I saw a blog post saying that they didn't know what MacBook Air was so they thought it was a bomb or something.
Trust me, you're wrong about "bad border officials." And having been in that room (at a different airport) 3 times, you also downplay the unpleasantness of it. I'm curious if you went through the fingerprint/mugshot process - can't remember if they bring that out on the first refusal or not.
Anyway everytime you get refused they seem to amp up the harassment. I'm reasonably sure if I tried to reapply, they'd be doing body-cavity searches.
You are 100% right about the unpleasantness of the entire ordeal. They did do the fingerprint, mugshot deal... but until I realized that he was going to refuse entry, I was being optimistic for some reason.
I did go easy on them in this article... perhaps as a reflection of my own paranoia about getting back in when I need to... I had mental images of 5 idle border officials googling my name as I sat in the waiting room.
"If you are a Web 2.0 company in today's Web you really need to ask yourselves, 'Are we solving a problem that everybody has or are we building a product for Robert Scoble?'"
Couldn't have said that better. There is a market for niche products online, to be sure. I think the problem is niche products pretending to be widely useful.
Yeah, even though you can set up redirects, the dilution on the brand you've spent so much time building is quite substantial. I went through this on a site I was managing, and it wasn't only a huge distraction, it took the brand in a direction I didn't necessarily agree with.
I'd guess that sticking with a decent name is better than changing to a marginally better one, as your experience suggests...
