ambertch

I'd guess for purity reasons. Volcanic eruptions don't always come from the mantle - in fact think convection cells, the rising material actually comes from deep down

Max Levchin put his money into Slide, Elon Musk put it all into Tesla/SpaceX, and I could name a lot of other entrepreneurs who did similarly but you get my point.

Investing in your own project isn't "commonsense," it's just an individual's view on risk management

At Burning Man I met a couple of people who work on the Tor project.

They were brilliant. Honestly it's going to be hard for a govt agency to recruit people like this - people who are incredibly passionate about security and cryptography may tend to care about privacy issues as well, for which the government currently incurs a negative sentiment, and this is compounded by the fact that brilliant people these days tend to work on problems they are ideologically aligned with. This isn't the Manhattan Project era anymore...

But you just never know, people come from all sorts of political backgrounds.

check out copycopter and bcms as well.

Honestly I'd say this depends on your goals - are you trying to learn? Or just make something (either answer is fine)? If the former, build. The latter, plug something in.

Yeah I was thinking about that too. Though if the limiting factor for switching speed is the impedance of the interconnects (I'm guessing it is), makes sense.

How come not many people are talking about this article in the context of entrepreneurship? Pretty astute advice for people doing startups.

"1) it fits the classic definition of a disruptive company and 2) is an innovative company playing in a large market with unsophisticated competitors."

Of course, everybody who does a startup has to go through the cloning phase. It's just part of learning how to build a business...

You cannot level such a stark criticism against a man who dared to be great - when you do so you embarrass only yourself.

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

RPX is defensive aggregation only - they don't go out and sue people.

There's also value add whenever you have centralized expertise: think PGExperts, Percona, and EnterpriseDB (mysql and postgres consultants) - if I'm running a company whose core business is not in the data, it's usually more economical to outsource that expertise than hire a 'superstar' DBA. Same with RPX: if your core business isn't IP law you might as well outsource that.

This is why consultancies of all shapes and types exist in the world, after all.

Companies spend millions just to defend a suit whether they win or lose - that's why they settle. The genius of RPX is that they basically identified that as an inefficiency aka market opportunity.

A lot of startups could learn from this model: taking an existing market and making it more efficient. That's usually a better bet than building an Instagram or Twitter analytics company - the big caveat of course is you actually have to have domain expertise in an industry to do this type of startup ;)

huh. I guess hacking hours have a non parametric distribution

Paul, how does C fits into the picture? I don't see anything in the source for compiling native extensions, and the implementations src/recommendify.c calls look incomplete?

I am guessing you still working on the gem?

Valid conjecture, but I think Ryan's always had that about him ("Camelcase... how cute")

Of course :) You stepping in and writing NPM was HUGE! Along with Ryan, you and guys like Tim, Guillermo, TJ, Felix, now Bert and others really got the ship pointed in the right direction

I think your question is more intended to ask about seed round - $500k-$1mm ish

Rule of thumb for first round of engineer hires is $85k as of late - they get substantial stock in return, about as much as managers hired after the A round.

Series A you're looking at closer to market wages, with obviously less stock