Startups: How much equity should be given when “nothing” is at stake?
Equity as the sole form of compensation is a recurring issue in today’s web2.0 boom. Many software startups need to hire to grow, however many if not most of them don’t have enough funds to hire the necessary talent for the obvious reason that: everyone wants cash.
Now let’s say you found someone willing to sacrifice a few months without salary. How much equity are you going to give? this brings up the issue of valuation. Equity should be correlated with the value of the company and of course the nature of service the new hire will provide.
In my case, since I have nothing but scattered ideas about how my product will be, I would say that at this stage, the valuation of my company might not exceed 3 to 5 hundred grands.
Now, my partner-to-be who happens to have much more experience than I do in startup related matters, wants to gradually get involved in my company. He is not ready yet to commit fully to the startup but he is willing to participate in some initial aspects of product development as well as serve as a mentor/advisor to me.
After several days of thinking, I decided that 4-5% should be good enough.. Normally, most startups give their advisors a little more than .5% – 1%. However, at the stage I’m at right now, I need his expertise more than that 4-5% equity. So I hope he’s going to accept. Of course, the percentage my advisor will get will be vested over a couple of years, and as soon as money comes in, I will start paying him for his time which should normally be a couple of hours a week.
Sure, if I had a prototype in place and had been through one financing round, things would have been different, but given the current state of things, I will be more than happy that someone of his level of expertise and interest in my product is on board.
In my view, there is nothing wrong with raising the bar a little higher than the advised 1% advisors usually get especially when your company is at its infancy. Several posts on the web refer to sub 1% percentages (Check this one in particular), yet they do say nothing about the valuation of the company and the value the advisor will bring.
for that particular reason, I believe there are several things to factor in when deciding what amount of equity a partner (or advisor in this instance) should get when joining a new venture:
- Can he brainstorm with you on product related issues?
- Can he participate in the design?
- Can he be an early beta tester?
- Can he provide you with legal advice?
- Will he be willing to introduce you to his connections?
- Does he have any previous startup experience?
- Does he have any business background?
- and last but not least, is he available to listen to you when you need him?
Will keep you posted regarding what my partner-to-be will say about my offer, and more about my startup.
Conversion d’une valeur numerique en texte francais (code for converting a numerical value to french text)
Pour ceux qui en auraient eventuellement besoin, j’ai uploade un snippet pour la conversion d’une valeur numerique/monetaire en texte. C’est un snippet que j’ai developpe il y a une dixaine d’annees (le temps passe vite!) et que j’ai decouvert en faisant le tour de mes vieux fichiers.
Je ne sais pas si ce sera d’aucune utilite pour qui que ce soit maintenant avec toutes les librairies qui existent, mais bon le voici tout de meme. Notez qu’il est ecrit en Basic (et le niveau de sa programmation est basique aussi 
) donc il peut etre mis dans une macro VBA.
Installing Windows XP using a non bootable CD and no floppy disks
Yesterday, a friend of mine asked me to install windows XP for him and take care of finding and downloading all the necessary drivers to his machine.
He provided me with a copy of Winxp Pro Cd. However, the CD was not bootable and there were no boot floppy disks with it.. So I found a pretty simple way to do this. It took me a while to find the solution, so I feel compelled to share it with those who might run into the same problem: (you need another working computer with a CD burner to do this by the way)
1: Get bootcd . Boot CD lets you create a bootable CD that has the necessary utlities to get your computer up and running for a windows install. It also allows you (among other cool things) to make your C: drive bootable so you can later on launch the windows install from the CD.
2. Uncompress the .zip file. The file contains an ISO file that you can use to create the Boot CD using your preferred CD burning tool. (I used Roxio)
3. Boot up with the CD you created (don’t forget to activate booting from the CDROM on your BIOS settings)
4. You will be given several options as to what CD driver you want to use.. press enter (first option offers support to most CDROM drivers)
5. Switch to the R: drive (all the utilities provided on the CD can be accessed from there)
6. Now depending on the state of your OS installation, you might wanna play around with fdisk or some other utilities to create a FAT32 partition, or format an existing one (refer to the README file that comes with Boot CD for the list of utilities and what they do). let’s assume for simplicity that you need a fresh install, call fdisk to create a new partition (and delete the existing one(s) if any), then format it using “format”.
7: Execute a utility called setuphd so all the basic system files are transferred to the C: drive. This will make C: bootable and make the CDROM recognizable from the start.
8. We’re almost there. Reboot your computer (remove the CD now or change your BIOS settings to boot up from the Hard disk)
9. Insert the Windows XP installation CD and type R: to switch the CDROM.
10. Go to directory R:\i386, then type “winnt” to launch the install.
11. At this point windows installation will take over.
Quick note: You might wanna convert the FAT32 partition (if you formatted the whole disk as FAT32) to an NTFS one. The Windows installation program will prompt you regarding this. Or you can keep it until all is installed and use the NTFS conversion utility that comes with your XP.
Ok, so here is my quick and sloppy guide to installing a non bootable Win XP CD on a computer with a defective or no OS. Hope it’ll help someone out there.
O’Reilly’s Safari
I did come across it a couple of times before, but I never thought I was ever gonna need it this bad until last night; I was quietly working on this project of mine which has a CORBA component. Being an absolute beginner in the field (though I did some RMI in the past ..far past) I kept on jumping from one page to the other looking for a solution to my headaches..memory management in corba sure is not a piece of cake. Anyways, short of solution and after a couple of posts to some forums that yielded no answers, I could not wait anymore and decided to get this book on CORBA and C++ which is considered by many as The book for serious corba programmers. Then I stumbled upon Safari…for $39.99 a month, you get access to the entire O’Reilly collection of books for geeks
I eventually managed to solve my problem quicker than I initially expected. Book navigation is a breeze, plus you get relevant suggestions to other chapters in related books as you page through the book.
I might have waited a couple more days for someone to get back to me on those forums, or just continued playing around with keywords on google hoping that I find a post by someone who has had a similar problem AND who has solved it AND published the solution..but that would have been a drag.
Though not a big fan of reading stuff online, I think this kind of service complemented with a good search service like that of google book search has a bright future.
Bottom line, not everything is on line… I definitely think making books available on line is something extremely useful, now the biz model around it is yet to be tuned. 40 bucks /month is still a lot of money, I think.
