Compensating Early Employees

October 16, 2014

In the early days of our startup, we were unable to pay market wages to our employees. Instead, we allotted heavy profits interest units to those employees, and we were all bonded together via our ownership and desire to make the most out of nothing. Profits interest units are not worth anything until there is an […]

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Articles on Fundraising

October 15, 2014

Over the years I have collected a nice set of articles on the topic of fundraising. I have printed those from my instapaper, here:  fundraising. What are your favorite articles on fundraising?  

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Retained Earnings and Taxes

October 14, 2014

As a startup begins to make money, often the disposition of the entrepreneurs is to reinvest profits back into the business. It is the prudent financial choice. Profits that are kept in the business for purposes of future growth are “retained earnings.” Retained earnings can have tricky tax implications for startups. For instance, if your […]

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Brinktop Needs Case Ideas

October 13, 2014

Today, 4 of us who are working on Brinktop got together to sync on the latest progress. I have written previously about how we are working on a kit for build-it-yourself Android tablets. We are super excited about bringing this to market. Our initial prototype is coming together nicely. We have a functional tablet from original […]

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ArrayFire’s Early Startup Role Models

October 11, 2014

When we started ArrayFire, we had 4 other startups in our market that provided role model information for us: Peakstream – they had the most similar mission to ArrayFire but had entered and exited the market before we even started, namely they sought to make parallel computing easier through a library with a simple vectorized interface […]

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Office Furniture

October 10, 2014

We just finished moving into our new office this week. It is a much bigger space than we have been in previously. We find ourselves now looking at office furniture. Ever since we got our first office space in 2009, we have always preferred an open office space without any private offices. I have never […]

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Atlanta Startups are Pragmatic

October 9, 2014

Three times in the last 24 hours, I have been reminded that Atlanta startups are pragmatic. First, last night entrepreneurial-minded students at Georgia Tech asked me what I thought about building startups in Atlanta. I said it is one of the only places in the world with such rich talent coupled with such low expenses. […]

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Building a Bootstrap-Minded Team

October 8, 2014

From the beginning of ArrayFire, our mindset was to bootstrap our team and retain full ownership of our business. That meant that we could not pay ourselves well in the early days. I’ve written about my first 5 years of salary previously. In addition to not paying ourselves very well, we were also not in […]

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Brand Equity

October 7, 2014

Another entrepreneur recently mentioned to me that he thinks his startup is now achieving added success merely because they have been around long enough to receive inbound leads. I mentioned to him that I had noticed a similar trend with ArrayFire several years after we started. I had noticed around year 3 that we didn’t […]

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Stock vs Salary in a Startup Offer Letter

October 6, 2014

8/we have no interest in hoarding. All employees get 3 offers inverted with salary/stock to choose from. We hope u join us and play to win! — Devon Wijesinghe (@DevonWijesinghe) October 6, 2014 Startups have the ability to compensate their people in a variety of ways. The two most prevalent forms of compensation are salary […]

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