mikeho1999's comments

Awesome idea... one quick feature suggestion -- on the bracket, itself, it'd might be nice to highlight any upsets (e.g. in bold and/or red or something like that).

Typically, variance in brackets is based on the upsets picked... so by making those more visible, it would make it easier for a human to more quickly digest the content.

Just a thought. But regardless, awesome idea. Well done!

All very good points... but one additional thing to add: what is his/her reputation with former co-workers / companies that s/he has worked with?

I had one co-founder who (we thought) had a very celebrated career at a very large (e.g. publicly traded) eCommerce-based company, making his way up to Sr. Director, etc. Considering we were starting similar type of company, it seemed like a perfect fit to bring him in as our chief executive.

However, we never asked for contacts / references with people he had worked with, VPs he worked under, etc.

When it came time to raising an institutional round, we were in due diligence with a VC that did look up those references, and it wasn't pretty. Turned out he had gotten fired by the company because he was using insider knowledge to basically try and start a competing company. Through his time there, he lost the trust of most of his co-workers and alienated everyone around him.

As our VC had then told us -- our CEO was a poison pill. Any VC we would talk to in the valley would have connections at this company, and would definitely follow up with their contacts at the company to find out more about our CEO, and every VC will come up with the same conclusion, that he is not to be trusted.

Had we known about all of this at the beginning (including how detrimental his relationships and his reputation has become), we would've never co-founded with him.

Definitely a tough lesson learned.

(Also not a lawyer... just someone who has run a single-person "cute freelancing" or "professional services" company for almost a decade now)

Not sure what you mean by "it's a big deal". It's critically important to keep the LLC's finances completely separate from... but the effort to do so is not that high.

My limited understanding is that this varies from state to state, but at least in California, all that's really required is for you to have a separate business checking or savings account, and that receipts should be deposited there, and expenses should be paid from there.

Having a separate Federal Tax ID isn't even required in California, although it is definitely highly recommended. And at least in terms of trying to get a business banking account, many banks will require it.

And @jtbigwoo, you can have a single-person LLC that is "disregarded" as a separate tax entity from the IRS's point of view, which means any revenue to the LLC would show up in your personal income tax (on a Schedule C), known as "flow thru" accounting. That means that no, you don't necessarily have to pay separate dividends and stuff just because you are an LLC.

As someone who has had a number of rejections from Apple (most of which have been corrected and thereafter accepted), I disagree with the comment.

Every time I have gotten a rejection, I have been pointed directly to the app store guidelines the specific bullet point or line item(s) as the reason for the rejection.

Most of the time, reading thru those bullet points were enough for me to figure out the "error" in my ways (although, some may argue that the guidelines themselves may be a bit draconian, but that's definitely a topic for another conversation...), and I was able to make the proper corrections, resubmit, and it was accepted.

Only on two occasions, was that not enough -- one time I disagreed with their assessment, and on the other time, I was confused as to how the guideline applied. Both times I submitted an appeal, and both times I received a response from an actual person / case manager who explained in much more detail what was going on.

(Now, whether or not the responses were timely is another issue... but I again, I digress...)

So, at least from my experience (3+ years of iOS development now), I haven't seen any cases where an app I was working on was rejected, without enough information to make the necessary corrections to fix the problem.

Sure, it'd be nice and incredibility useful to the innovation curve if the information was dispatched a more time efficient manner... but to say that the information was "lacking" and "curt" just hasn't been the case, at least for me and my experience.

Matt, first of all, thanks to you and your team for posting in the comments on sites like HN, TechCrunch, and all the other sites where the news is starting to hit the tech community. I know it can't be easy to read so many critical comments against a company that I am sure has been a great place for you to work at.

However, I think trying to spin things as "everything at (mt) will be the same... only better" is a bit of a disservice to the tech community you are trying to reach out to, which is inherently more savvy about the reasoning and justification behind the acquisition itself.

In short: No company ever sets out to acquire another company to just keep things the same.

I do not doubt that in the short term, not much will change. But starting within the next year or so, there is no doubt in anyone's minds that the combined leadership team of GD and (mt) will begin to capitalize on business, product and technological "synergies" to help increase the bottom line.

That's not a knock against you, GD, (mt) or anyone. That's just business.

But what does that mean for all of your existing (mt) customers?

GoDaddy's modus operandi of profit maximization through questionable-at-best marketing practices, minimizing costs in customer and technical support, and taking any short cuts possible even at the detriment of the customer, does appear completely at odds with the high value of support and refined products that (mt) had prided itself over the years.

So the $400M question (or however much the acquisition was for) is: can these vastly different approaches of your business models be reconciled at all? Or will one way end up "winning out" over the other way? And if it's the latter, who will end up "winning out"... the GoDaddy way, or the (mt) way?

I do apologize if I come up to some of my own conclusions ahead of time, but I hope you guys can prove me wrong. But as I am now an outsider looking in, it ultimately won't make too much of a difference to me -- I actually have been in the process (and am nearly complete) in moving all of my clients off of GoDaddy to AWS (for completely unrelated reasons, mostly dealing with pricing).

But as someone who had been a customer for over 8 years and as someone who had been an advocate for (mt), I couldn't help from having the feeling of "whew, I just dodged a bullet" after hearing this news.

I wonder if the bias towards or against freelancers is dependent upon your geographic location...

Living in the SF Bay Area as someone who regularly bounces back and forth between freelancing and working full-time as a co-founder or lead tech of a startup, I didn't find any difference in attitude or reaction if I said "I'm working at a startup" vs. "I'm a full time freelancer."

LOL, in fact, the reaction tended to be either "oh yeah? me too!" or "oh yeah? so is my brother / sister / mother / daughter / father / son / dog / cat / etc."

Looking at the OP's footer, looks like he's in NYC... so I wonder if the bias there is a bit different?

Actually, I don't think it's as much as self-taught vs. formal CS training at a 4-year university vs. some sort of vocational schooling vs. whatever...

I think it's more the question of: what is the driving motivation for getting into the industry in the first place?

The best developers I've worked with and have had the most respect for were ones that have had a lifelong love for computers and computing technology, reflected through things like always tinkering with software (and even hardware), enjoyment in building their own linux boxes, and/or having the proverbial "I've been programming since I was 5" type of story. In my experience, I've found that these type of candidates have the highest chance for success, regardless of the type of formal training that they may or may not have had.

The ones that I'm a bit more suspect on are the ones that think about getting into this industry mostly because of articles like this that focus on the "OMG he's making $$$ 6-figures", but that have never shown much of a prior interest for software, programming, etc.. Basically, for folks in this group, it seems like they get excited for coding only after they've heard stories like this and maybe started checking out Codecademy or decided to take CS 101 because it fulfilled a core / distribution requirement at their 4-year university.

Am I saying that the folks in the second group are not going to be good programmers? By all means no. But I'm just saying as a level of chance vs. risk, I feel that those in the first group have a higher chance of producing as a quality software engineer than those in the second group.

Actually... looking at the pictures, I'm surprised about how much was left behind in general. For example, the kitchen had industrial baking and mixing equipment, etc., which I'm sure is all worth a decent amount of dough (pun very very much intended =).

Anyway, all of this reminds me about a documentary I saw called Urban Explorers (you can probably find it on netflix)... pretty interesting stuff out there.

Thanks for the post!