benpanter's comments

Yeup. Interesting how the older LED bulbs are particularly bad for this (and in the UK, at 50Hz). More modern high quality ones seem significantly better.

I wonder whether they have an external broker, or just self insure? With so many staff, it seems they could quite sensibly operate this internally.

In my case, I founded a company based on the algorithmic approaches I developed as an academic - www.blackfordanalysis.com

Folks who did their PhDs about the same time as me, and progressed through a couple of postdoc positions, are variously: science teachers, data scientists, product managers, quants, environmental analysts, software engineers, hardware engineers and industrial scientists.

In the UK, fewer than one in ten astronomers who take a first astronomy job post-PhD (usually called a postdoc) progress to a permanent faculty position. Those that do make the journey typically take about a decade and three to four fixed-term positions to get there.

The "paper" is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.06090 but its analysis is not really something that you'd get published in an astronomy journal [speaking as a former professional astronomer]

Not quite the same, but if you were interested in this story you might be interested in reading "Last Man Off" by Matt Lewis. It's the story of how he survived a fishing boat sinking in the Antarctic. Basically came down to luck and having donned the appropriate survival suit, but very much touch and go and many of his fellow crew members didn't make it.

For full disclosure he's a friend of mine, but the book is a gripping read.

From a business perspective I think it's important to move from thinking about "elapsed time" to "value created", especially when considering co-founders with different skill sets. In my experience the two are only very loosely correlated.

How would you barter between product development and sales?

How about if the sales person worked a day a week but closed ten times as many sales as the full time dev?

What if you got a co-founder who investors trusted from prior experience that drove them to actually invest?

How about someone leaving college versus someone who could earn several $100k on the open market?

Apparently[1] teams tend to do better than loan founders, and ultimately whatever you put together has to be tuned to what would motivate the other members of the team to stick around as long as you need them to in order that value is created. I don't believe there is a cookie cutter that fits.

[1] Somewhere in Disciplined Entreprenuership, Bill Autlet, MIT

We (Scotland / UK) are metric for almost everything - science/engineering, medicine, quantities of food etc.

There are a few exceptions in more human measurements - beer is measured in pints, burgers and steaks in ounces, distances on roads in miles and personal dimensions in feet and inches, barleycorns and stones.