GolfyMcG

One of the scenarios they describe - hiring documents - strikes me as a VERY limited value proposition. I can’t imagine someone paying a lawyer to review their hiring documents more than once. All of the associated documents (offer letter, non-disclosure, non-compete, assignment, stock options, etc.) are so easily automated with a basic eSignature tool like HelloSign. Our attorneys simply gave us template docs (billing very little time) and we’ve used them for dozens of employees and multiple due diligence processes. The actual ROI sounds minimal at best.

I can see this being more useful in a sales situation where you need to make concessions much more regularly and need flexibility in your legal documents. Depending on how hard Atrium is to configure, I suspect it could be a lower cost version of setting up Salesforce CPQ. However, you likely still want this process to be integrated into Salesforce at some point so you’ll have to do that separately still.

Also, the frequency of automating your financing docs is not very compelling. In my experience, your investors provide the term sheets and then you need to redline them back to them. The idea of scanning these types of documents to extract the meaningful data points is very cool (ie. Comparing valuations automatically across spreadsheets) but I would still say a manual review from an attorney is essential due to the risk/reward of missing some small item that isn’t conventional in a term sheet.

I’m curious if anyone here has used Atrium and has see a compelling ROI for your team?

I think "crashes" is a little bit sensationalist. They're down which is obviously not great but they're down by less than 10% at my time of writing. While it won't get as many upvotes this should probably be titled "Lyft IPO Poorly Received" or more literally, "Lyft Down 10% After IPO"*

Edit: This is actually their second business day.

Thanks! I also always felt like I was being ripped off by other companies too. The cost severely outweighed the value I received. With Zoom, I pay a lot for Zoom rooms but they are magical. Normal user accounts are affordable and they work. All in, I feel like I pay for the value I’m receiving and it feels like an equitable deal.

Ps. I swear this isn’t a Zoom ad. It’s like the cops - if I say it this has to be true?! That’s how this works, right?

Zoom charged us a fraction of what we paid other more traditional video conferencing companies (GoToMeeting, WebEx) and provided I think a better product in many regards. Not only that, they paid out our previous contract too (worth tens of thousands of dollars). At the time I thought either (a) they're losing tons of money to close deals and grow or (b) traditional video conferencing companies are built on infrastructure that was required 10 years ago but with modern advances in web technology they either didn't lower their operating costs by upgrading or did and just take more money off the top. Either way, they're overcharging. Based on Zoom's financials, I think it's the latter.

If I recall correctly, the founder of Zoom came from Cisco. This all strikes me as someone technical seeing all the waste at their existing job and trying to make change happen. Cisco couldn't see the forest for the trees and never took them up on their ideas. The employee believed there was a large enough technology gap so they left and totally undercut them by delivering the same (or better) product for a fraction of the cost.

To answer your first point, you could argue that but the reality for Twitch is that they may not possess the bandwidth to build it themselves.

That's not to say that they aren't smart enough, or don't have the money, or don't possess some sort of hard skill or item that would let them do it. It's the nature of successful companies to focus on their core competencies and Twitch may consider it not worth the risk of distracting themselves. If it picks up traction, they will go to Revlo and look to invest/obtain warrants in the business. If it's even more successful, they'll try to acquire it and then they'll have the solution without all the risk.

This dynamic is played out in a lot of industries and is hardly a reason to not pursue this idea.

A practice we've implemented to manage this is tagging pull requests that have anything over 250 added (green) lines of code. Before anyone is willing to give you a code review, you have to justify why such a pull request requires so many lines, break it into multiple pull requests, or refactor your code. Often times, it makes review easier because the PR's are smaller and enforces a simple baseline that tells the programmer, your code is too big!

This takes such a short-sighted, illogical view of the underlying mechanics that tax expenditures and tax breaks rely on.

In the case of SNAP, you are eligible for those benefits if you are below a certain % of the federal poverty limit (FPL) based on your household size. If you earn more than a certain amount, you no longer qualify because presumably you should be able to pay for food on your own. This very directly says, "We will give you something of monetary value, if you remain poor."

In the case of a tax break, like contributing to your HSA or IRA, you don't have to pay taxes on that income (or at least not now). You can contribute up to a certain amount each year but beyond that you no longer receive that benefit. This very directly says, "We will give something of monetary value, if you save money."

Both are using government funds to encourage behavior "We will give you something of monetary value, if you [perform some behavior]." I would suggest that the intended behavior is fundamentally different and is where the real difference in these two lie.

Perhaps I'm jumping to conclusions based on the tone of the article, but the author seems to indicate that both scenarios are equally problematic, when I think there is a very logical difference. Both achieve a similar short-term net output - $X in potential taxes not remaining in the government. The difference is about whether the $X creates long-term value that exceeds that value and she seems to gloss over that to drum up a controversial article.

Edit: I'm not suggesting that either breaks of expenses are inherently better than the other. For example, an earned income credit, to me, seems to encourage a behavior that would be in line with the motives behind a tax break. I just think this is a very short-sighted analysis of both ideas and serves only to create controversy.

This is what a PE (Private Equity) Firm basically does from my understanding.

They are a company, that buys, (hopefully) improves, and then sells companies. For example, a PE Firm might have some expertise in mining. They hear about a company that builds some sort of mining technology. They've done pretty well so far but they've really leveled out. The PE Firm decides to buy them, install a new CEO, revise some business practices to help cut costs, and now as the same business they bought but with a better bottom-line. They then sell it.

What you're describing is like an earlier stage PE firm.

Ps. I don't know why I expect a better analysis from this article since it's in Slate...

Additionally, I don't like the percent increases on absolute numbers. I feel like some normalized data (either per capita, or per capita in specific metropolitan areas) would be very helpful.

Ie. Fake example, The crime in San Francisco shot up by 400% - woah! So much more crime. The population in San Francisco also shot up by 10,000%. Oh, so you're telling me that the ratio of criminals to non-criminals dropped by 95%?

I think the author's definition of homeless is a little bit facetious and it sounds like a humble brag. It's very different to be homeless because you ran your technology startup into the ground and another to be seriously challenged by your socioeconomic standing leading you from affordable housing, to a shelter, to the street, ad infinitum.

IDK how small your company is but I HIGHLY recommend switching to JustWorks. We were able to remove a lot of duplicated services by just using them. It's got a brilliant interface and is super user friendly for our employees.

We simply didn't need the level of functionality required in other software applications, which were clearly built for small to medium sized companies with an actual HR department. We wanted to hire employees and contractors, manage their payroll, manage time off, and give employees other basic benefits, like Healthcare and transportation.

Only downside to JustWorks is that it costs more than Zenefits which is free. Can't speak to Gusto's capabilities and pricing though.

Couldn't agree more. We built up a huge cucumber test suite and are now struggling to transfer it all over to RSpec with our unit specs. We were convinced we were doing it all wrong but after speaking with some of the developers at thoughbot it seems we're not alone. Transferring projects from cucumber to RSpec+capybara has become something of a regular occurrence and they have RARELY seen anyone use cucumber successfully.

I'm not a recruiter but we tried to hire someone who needed an H1-B/J1 visa and it was truly awful. We went through trying to make it work/expedite the process but there was nothing to be done. He was awarded the visa and we would have still had to wait another 4 or 5 months till they could actually start.

I'm usually quite proud of the United States but it was baffling to me how challenging this was. We have a highly qualified person, who has an employer looking to pay them, of which they will have taxes going to the United States, you've already vetted them as being okay, and yet it's still going to take nearly half a year for you to allow them to come work here.

It makes me wonder what the hell people do all everyday at the government.

To answer your question, I don't think anyone, especially a recrutier, can make the process easier.