Shanti’s Dispatches

I have mentioned The Business Experiment before here previously.

Robert May has posted a lengthy explanation of some of the issues they are facing as they attempt to incorporate their first venture.

Why can’t we incorporate like a regular startup?

Most regular startups incorporate as a C corporation. The rules governing this were laid out in the securities acts after the market crash of 1929, to protect investors. Ownership in a C corporation is considered a security. It is illegal to advertise securities for sale under most conditions. As a general rule, securities must be registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission. However, there are several ways around this . Unfortunately, we don’t meet any of the requirements, except the ones that still require a disclosure document (i.e. a $15,000 preparation). We could get an exemption if

a)we keep incorporation to fewer than 35 people

b)we keep all the owners in the same state, and the total value to less than $1 million

c)every owner is an “accredited investor,” meaning a net worth of $1million or more or yearly income of 250K

Read more here

I (acting as benevolent guy behind the scenes of Ajax Blog) had a chance recently to sit down with the breakout team of vSocial.com.

We wanted to pick the brains of the vSocial founding team and learn about: starting a new social networking site, building a large-scale, high-bandwidth web app, developing with Ajax, building traffic/buzz, life hacks, and more.

The numbers speak for themselves: vSocial has gone from 0 to 71M+ monthly page views, 270K+ unique daily visitors and 45M videos served a month … all in about 120 days!

Brad Webb and Mark Sigal of vSocial were kind enough to sit down with Ajax Blog for the following interview. Enjoy!

Can you describe how the company or concept behind vSocial.com came about?

The core platform behind vSocial was developed over the past three years (with vSocial’s other co-founder, Brent Oesterblad) as part of a general purpose social media platform for uploading and sharing pictures, music, movies and other rich media content items. Looking at the market mid-last year, it was clear that Internet video was about to hit in a big way, and we felt that we had a lot of “secret sauce” to bring to the equation so we opted to focus there. The underlying platform is quite feature rich, and we expect to roll more of it out into the market in the coming months.

(Cont’d…)

Read the full interview: How vSocial Went from 0 to 71 Million Page Views in (about) 120 Days

Well, I think blogging has finally jumped the shark.

MC Hammer now has a blog.

You know you had the Hammer Pants back in the 80s. Just admit it.

In less than 30 hours, I’ll be moving on from my current employer.

It’s been a fun little ride, but other opportunities have presented themselves and it’s really just the perfect timing for me.

I’d like to give a big shoutout to my pals here at the office — Thomas, Ed, Jim, Ron, Scott, Eric and the whole gang. Sorry I won’t be continuing with ya’ll, but Ruby on Rails, web app development, and early-stage startups are where my heart lies at the moment.

Starting Small, Finishing ….. ? with Sprout

I have the domain name StartSmallFinishBig.com, which I haven’t decided quite what to do with yet. Maybe a small biz blog, or local small biz networking group, who knows.

The thing I dislike about the term small business, though, is that it can:

1) Imply that what you’re doing is small. When clearly small teams can do big things.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. - Margaret Mead

2) Imply that you’ll always be small. This is obviously not the case, but the picture I have of a “small business” is one in which the owner is struggling very hard to get things off the ground.

That first 1-2 years can be incredibly difficult and many (or most - I think like 80%) do not make it.

I hazard to guess that two years of struggle, stress and just barely making ends meet … is not the reason small business entrepreneurs went into business for themselves.

The Ideal Small Business

My ideal small business would be 100% automated, or backed up by a dedicated team of on-call support reps. So that, you know, I could take 2-month long vacations in Fiji and the Virgin Islands. Then stop off in Vail for a nice little snowboarding session.

E-mail and Internet access would be used to login and see the latest stats — how many new clients had signed up or how many new sales were made. (Oh, another $2,236 today, w00t!)

So, small is just a state of mind. It’s a stepping stone. That’s all.

The Big Act - Sproutit’s Weblog

You can follow along with our journey over on The Big Act - Sproutit’s weblog on small business, technology, our software and doing what you love.

Funny, we were just talking about this at the office the other day.

Bruce Eckel’s The Ideal Programmer is making the rounds on del.icio.us/popular.

Bruce is unable to point to the exact source of this folklorish anecdote, but says:

My favorite, because it’s such a wake-up call, is that 5% of the programmers are 20 times more productive than the other 95%.

If you do know the source — of an actual scientific study confirming something along these lines — please drop a note in the comments section!

I do believe that something to this effect is true - but perhaps it’s just the top 1% or 0.5%, whatever.

My point (to my buddies) was that: Ok, presuppose it’s true, which doesn’t seem like that big of a stretch. There are always those people who are way off the charts at both ends of the bell curve.

Enter: Magic Geodesic Dome of Productivity Measurement

Let’s suppose there was a magic geodesic dome you could throw people in and measure their productivity, even all those immeasurables like people skills.

The computer says, “Alert, Alert! Larry von Lutzhowzer, your new senior programmer, is 20x as productive on an individual basis as Billy, Joe, Bob, Nancy and Chuck, who’ve all been given great marks but have roughly the same salary as Larry.”

Do you think Larry would even remotely get a bump in pay commensurate with his measured output levels (20 times, with lower bug incidence rates!)?!?

Of course not. He’d be lucky to be making twice as much, even after they determined beyond all reasonable doubt that he was 20x as productive as some of the other team members.

Please note: there are always those under-appreciated Catalysts of the team, who might not output as many Lines of Code or bug fixes, but provide invaluable glue and motivation. Their loss can spell certain doom to a project that’s already teetering on the edge.

So — What’s your point, smart ass?

Go work for a startup, or start one yourself.

That’s the only way you can leverage your skills beyond a paycheck + linearly increasing annual raise.

Turn that 5, 10 or 20x productivity into better products and services. Go all out and hit those High Notes instead of settling for second best.

ps. I know, I know. This is nothing that hasn’t been said before. Sometimes we all need a little reminder.

Here’s a nice basic intro to sleplessness and sleep health at Stanford.

Hint: you should probably get some sleep when you see yourself starting to ping email addresses and SSH into web urls. *ahem*

Finally upgraded WordPress on here to 2.0.1 and got this site moved over to a new server.

Things were getting a little slow around here and it was a pain to blog. That’s all =)