06 October 2008
The next level in nutz technology
This is it people, until someone manages to cram a tiny TV into them* we have reached the zenith of nutz:
Behold Brakenutz! For only $49.99 plus shipping you can have glowing testes on your truck! There's a video available too.
*If you do this cut me in on a piece of the action
Behold Brakenutz! For only $49.99 plus shipping you can have glowing testes on your truck! There's a video available too.
*If you do this cut me in on a piece of the action
02 September 2008
Ean Golden reviews the Vestax VCI-300
Ean Golden, DJ, "controllerist" and guy behind DJ Tech Tools has the first review I've seen of the Vestax VCI-300 for Remix magazine. He seems to like it but misses all the tweakability of his preferred Traktor/VCI-100 setup. No real surprises, this thing has been in production so long I think people know how it's going to work. As far as the thing most people care about:
Now for the question I get most, “Can you really scratch with it?” Yes, the VCI-300 takes a big leap forward in this department. The combination of the high-resolution performance and a lot of fine tuning in the software mean that the VCI-300 and Itch provide better scratch performance than any out-of-the-box MIDI controller I have tested so far.Read the whole thing here.
14 August 2008
Guide to valuing your stock options
I wrote this for the forums, but I figured I'd post it here too since it's probably the single longest thing I've written in months...
Since it's far more likely you'll work for one or more startups before starting your own I'll explain in plain terms what it means when you agree to a lower salary and stupid hours in exchange for theoretical future money.
Options have a vesting schedule typically of 2-5 years. The most common one is a 4-year schedule where you get 25% vested after 12 months and then vest monthly from then on. There's also frequently clauses that accelerate your vesting in the event of a buyout or other "liquidity event". This means that you'll probably quit or be let go before being fully vested so adjust accordingly.
The number of shares is irrelevant until you know the total number of outstanding shares. If a recruiter tells you they'll "have to look into it" that typically means that there's a lot.
Taxes are a bitch, especially when you get into AMT territory.
Keep in mind that your stock is worth nothing until you can actually sell it. There's rare exceptions like Facebook founders but you're not going to work at the next Facebook.
So let's say the next hot microvlogging site wants to give you a job. They offer you 5000 shares! sounds rad, right? Work hard, get in nerf wars at the office, make "fuck you money!"
So let's do some math:
You get 5000 shares for $0.10 each but there's 10 million outstanding. That means you "own" 0.05% of the company. But hey, maybe Google will buy you guys for a billion dollars! That means you'll still get half a million dollars aka "fudge you money".
Google wasn't interested. But Microsoft is very bound and determined to throw their money in a hole so they start sniffing around. Everyone goes into crunch time to spit-shine everything and sign some deals. The douchey sales guy has nothing but awesome graphs to show at the all-hands, all the arrows are going up. This is "the push". Something's going to go down this year though but you've got an acceleration clause so if you make it to 12 months you get 50%. That's $250k, aka "Most of a studio condo in Palo Alto money".
Microsoft has decided that scent-based interfaces are the next big thing and decide to pass. The CEO is increasingly manic and has a habit of cruising around the office at 9pm to see who's a "team player". Fortunately Yahoo's new board is looking to inject some excitement into the brand. That new release coming soon will be what pushes them over the edge. You're sleeping under to office pool table. The sales aren't quite meeting projections but they are OK, you just need a little more runway to make it happen. The company gets $5 million in series B which means a 40% dilution. That's still $150k, aka "Porsche 911 [but maybe not a GT3] money".
Success! Yahoo took the bait but they negotiated down to $500 million. The VCs, already $20 million deep decide to go for it. The CEO, VP of sales and the CEO's assistant have a coke orgy with each other in the office bathroom. Suspiciously cheap bottles of champagne are popped, people who you didn't know worked there are at some parties. You've still got $75k coming which is "A BMW and that trip around the world you always wanted to take money".
You get $75k in Yahoo stock. Party time! Oh wait, Carl Icahn posts a drunken rant on his blog and the stock drops 20% before your exercise date. We're down to $60k or "A Lexus and a timeshare in Cabo money".
OK, time to sell! Whoops! Short-term capital gains tax is a bitch. After taxes and accountants you're left with almost $40k or "fully loaded Honda Accord and a Pioneer Kuro money".
And all you had to give up was a year of your social life, the 25 pounds you gained from raiding the office snack cabinet and 4 months of weekends. And you've got some "tin handcuffs" of a retention bonus that keeps you working at Yahoo until you get laid off when MS finally picks up the pieces at a fire sale 2 years later.
Since it's far more likely you'll work for one or more startups before starting your own I'll explain in plain terms what it means when you agree to a lower salary and stupid hours in exchange for theoretical future money.
Options have a vesting schedule typically of 2-5 years. The most common one is a 4-year schedule where you get 25% vested after 12 months and then vest monthly from then on. There's also frequently clauses that accelerate your vesting in the event of a buyout or other "liquidity event". This means that you'll probably quit or be let go before being fully vested so adjust accordingly.
The number of shares is irrelevant until you know the total number of outstanding shares. If a recruiter tells you they'll "have to look into it" that typically means that there's a lot.
Taxes are a bitch, especially when you get into AMT territory.
Keep in mind that your stock is worth nothing until you can actually sell it. There's rare exceptions like Facebook founders but you're not going to work at the next Facebook.
So let's say the next hot microvlogging site wants to give you a job. They offer you 5000 shares! sounds rad, right? Work hard, get in nerf wars at the office, make "fuck you money!"
So let's do some math:
You get 5000 shares for $0.10 each but there's 10 million outstanding. That means you "own" 0.05% of the company. But hey, maybe Google will buy you guys for a billion dollars! That means you'll still get half a million dollars aka "fudge you money".
Google wasn't interested. But Microsoft is very bound and determined to throw their money in a hole so they start sniffing around. Everyone goes into crunch time to spit-shine everything and sign some deals. The douchey sales guy has nothing but awesome graphs to show at the all-hands, all the arrows are going up. This is "the push". Something's going to go down this year though but you've got an acceleration clause so if you make it to 12 months you get 50%. That's $250k, aka "Most of a studio condo in Palo Alto money".
Microsoft has decided that scent-based interfaces are the next big thing and decide to pass. The CEO is increasingly manic and has a habit of cruising around the office at 9pm to see who's a "team player". Fortunately Yahoo's new board is looking to inject some excitement into the brand. That new release coming soon will be what pushes them over the edge. You're sleeping under to office pool table. The sales aren't quite meeting projections but they are OK, you just need a little more runway to make it happen. The company gets $5 million in series B which means a 40% dilution. That's still $150k, aka "Porsche 911 [but maybe not a GT3] money".
Success! Yahoo took the bait but they negotiated down to $500 million. The VCs, already $20 million deep decide to go for it. The CEO, VP of sales and the CEO's assistant have a coke orgy with each other in the office bathroom. Suspiciously cheap bottles of champagne are popped, people who you didn't know worked there are at some parties. You've still got $75k coming which is "A BMW and that trip around the world you always wanted to take money".
You get $75k in Yahoo stock. Party time! Oh wait, Carl Icahn posts a drunken rant on his blog and the stock drops 20% before your exercise date. We're down to $60k or "A Lexus and a timeshare in Cabo money".
OK, time to sell! Whoops! Short-term capital gains tax is a bitch. After taxes and accountants you're left with almost $40k or "fully loaded Honda Accord and a Pioneer Kuro money".
And all you had to give up was a year of your social life, the 25 pounds you gained from raiding the office snack cabinet and 4 months of weekends. And you've got some "tin handcuffs" of a retention bonus that keeps you working at Yahoo until you get laid off when MS finally picks up the pieces at a fire sale 2 years later.
08 May 2008
Emergency Party Button
Further adventures in a new category I'm calling "Automated Party Technology". This is more of a brute force solution than the International Dance Party.
25 March 2008
#1 Party robot rewards you for getting down
The International Dance Party is an automated system to bring fun to what appears to be people in ironic sunglasses. I consider it a robot because I consider most things robots.
Labels: APT, music, robots, tech
02 January 2008
Outlook UI Annoyances vol. 1: Unread Items
Like many "knowledge workers" in the world I am chained to the Microsoft Outlook at work for my email and calendaring purposes. My own personal thoughts on email as a collaboration tool aside [that's for another day and perhaps its own startup] there's somethings about it that drive me absolutely batty. Today's annoyance:
There's so many things wrong with this that it's not even funny. In Outlook the following things count as "Unread Mail":
This is only what appears as the number of unread messages in Outlook's folder list. As far as deleted items go, I can almost understand where they were coming from with this one. A user might have accidentally "missed" the item they were trying to delete or got a little too aggressive with the Delete key.*
Being used to Apple Mail and Thunderbird this one spooks me out a lot. The items that appear in the Unread Mail view are never updated until you manually refresh by viewing something else. Mail and Thunderbird both do this with things that you read and leave in your inbox but not with filed or deleted mail. So in Outlook if you read a message and delete it it stays in your unread folder. If you read a message and file it in another folder it stays in your unread messages folder. It's like they want you to navigate around the product or something.
In something that I can't tell if it's ironic or not if you have an empty mailbox selected and mail comes into it it will mark it as read because it autoselects it. This can be solved by turning off "mark as read after X time" function but I don't know how you could live without that [set to 0 seconds]. I certainly can't.
*Another annoyance is Microsoft's hatred of the backspace key being used to delete anything that's not text and instead having it actually navigate away from what you're looking at.
Notification of unread items
There's so many things wrong with this that it's not even funny. In Outlook the following things count as "Unread Mail":
- Deleted mail you haven't "read", including ones that you use the pop-up notifications to resolve
- auto-saved drafts of mail messages that are still being composed
This is only what appears as the number of unread messages in Outlook's folder list. As far as deleted items go, I can almost understand where they were coming from with this one. A user might have accidentally "missed" the item they were trying to delete or got a little too aggressive with the Delete key.*
The "Unread Mail" folder itself
Being used to Apple Mail and Thunderbird this one spooks me out a lot. The items that appear in the Unread Mail view are never updated until you manually refresh by viewing something else. Mail and Thunderbird both do this with things that you read and leave in your inbox but not with filed or deleted mail. So in Outlook if you read a message and delete it it stays in your unread folder. If you read a message and file it in another folder it stays in your unread messages folder. It's like they want you to navigate around the product or something.
In something that I can't tell if it's ironic or not if you have an empty mailbox selected and mail comes into it it will mark it as read because it autoselects it. This can be solved by turning off "mark as read after X time" function but I don't know how you could live without that [set to 0 seconds]. I certainly can't.
*Another annoyance is Microsoft's hatred of the backspace key being used to delete anything that's not text and instead having it actually navigate away from what you're looking at.
