Justin Kan

If a big company believes that buying you could lead to them owning the panic button space, it could be worth a lot. Otherwise, it's probably close to $0. Your biggest danger is spending a lot of time chasing deals and ultimately selling for close to $0 and having to work for the acquirer for a year or more. In that case, it'd be far better to pull the plug now (which you can do by all quitting) and move on to the next project. More advice is at https://justinkan.com/the-founders-guide-to-selling-your-company-a1b20…

Here's the correct URL: https://justinkan.com/why-i-love-snapchat-23d31ea87d3c

I think Justin Kan is a bit of a special case here: http://justinkan.com/why-i-love-snapchat

The classic scaling problem! Justin.tv faced the same one. [0] > "a sign behind Emmett’s desk read “HAVE YOU CHECKED THE FILE DESCRIPTOR LIMITS?” Side note... does anyone know why the default FD limit is so low at 1024 on most machines? It seems like there's very little cost to changing it to a high value (e.g. 65535). [0] http://justinkan.com/three-stories

A good reminder that an "acquisition proposal" without any indication of price is not an acquisition proposal. Asking so much information without any such indication is just crazy. I strongly recommend this excellent post from Justin Kan: http://justinkan.com/the-founders-guide-to-selling-your-company

You are definitely onto something huge here [1]: you could be improving the livelihood of millions with an app to allow people to fill in on temp jobs at competitive wages with the click of a button. Talk of a massive impact... The road ahead is steep, though. At first I thought Leah's TaskRabbit would eventually head that way, but to me it strikes me as if she's still massively underestimating the potential of her platform. Justin Kan's Exec and its postmortem doesn't bode too well, either (but it's still an insightful read) [2]. I'm pretty sure though you and AB have what it takes to figure it all out. [1] http://www.propublica.org/article/the-expendables-how-the-temps-who-po… [2] http://justinkan.com/exec-errands-post-mortem

This is the same thought I had after reading Justin Kan's post (http://justinkan.com/what-good-is-experience). I was surprised by how much emphasis Justin placed on the importance of experience. I feel one of the best traits of an entrepreneur is the ability to learn quickly and figure things out on the fly.

Firstly congrats, that's great that your business has driven so much ARR with 1 person and no funding! Based on your question I assume that you haven't sold a business before so here's some things to think about, ultimately before even deciding whether a sale makes sense for you. This is a timely post, my company had an acquisition offer that we ultimately rejected so I have some insights FWIW. A brain dump: 1. Only engage in acquisition talks if you're very serious. They consume a lot of time - negotiating will become your new job. The view is don't talk to Corp Dev unless you're serious [1] (this is very true) 2. Really you should sell when you don't want to sell [2]. Firesales will produce a minimal $ outcome. The upside is it's a complete package - a sale is still a sale (successful entrepreneur/exit), you're getting something for the business, it's a good resume story especially if you're a first-time founder. You'll also get a good job at the acquirers business 3. The market price isn't based on some X of your ARR, it's whatever someone is willing to pay you, so $200k ARR sounds great (congrats btw), but it's what you're worth to them. 4. Asset sale vs stock sale - generally businesses want your assets not your stock, whereas the tax for you (assuming you owned you stock >1 year) will be less via a stock sale, you'd be double-taxed from an asset sale so really try against this way [3] 5. Tax is a big consideration. In CA, long term capital gains is ~30% vs ordinary…

Best you're going to get is a Rashomon-style retelling. Anybody early on has retold the story so many times - pitching new hires, onboarding the next wave of employees, and then the next wave, and then the next wave - that they probably don't really remember the real thing very clearly anymore. Then there's also the pressure to agree to a similar narrative, not necessarily in a bad way, just like any couple has agreed on a how they met story, they've been telling it for so long and had the arguments about "did that happen?" that the story has been set. Who knows what happened. You'd have to assemble a collage of The Official Story, some of the weirder first interviews the group gave in the press, early non-hires who interviewed and caught a glimpse of a weird snapshot, the inevitable disgruntled folk (who may not inevitably wrong). Aside from that, I do like http://justinkan.com/three-stories , it's a good series of disasters.

Not sure... what part of it interests you? Teamwork? Innovation? Decision making? I was putting together a "best read of 2015" type post but never finished it. There were a couple on my list that I think are related and maybe you'd find interesting. This one from HN a few weeks back, http://justinkan.com/three-stories Higher level company organization stuff I thought these two books gave at times contradictory and at times very complimentary thoughts on what made teams work. In reality, neither were exactly about making teams work though :) Playing to Win http://www.amazon.com/Playing-Win-Strategy-Really-Works/dp/1491528796 is on creating strategies Reinventing organizations http://www.amazon.com/Reinventing-Organizations-Frederic-Laloux/dp/296… is about holacracy but talks a lot to people's motivations in a company. Hopefully I have a couple more interesting things to say on andrewxhill.com too, so keep an eye on it!

How much are you paying though? The service is undoubtably being heavily subsidized by VC money. This is the classic silicon valley model, a model I love, but there has to be a light at the end of the tunnel. As noted in the OP, this also reminds me a lot of Exec, and Exec didn't work. In the post-mortem, JK makes a very interesting point: > if a job request came in and there were no Execs available to run them ... we sent someone from the office to run the jobs ourselves. Unfortunately, this gave us a false sense that the quality of service for our customers was better than it was, as the average competence of our employees was higher than our average recruitable errand runners. [1] This is a critical problem that any service business like Magic will run into. Training and quality becomes much harder at scale, and the more you have to pay for "Magicians", the more you have to charge. And if it costs too much money, it isn't "Magical" anymore. Yes, they have advantages over Exec because they can arbitrage less expensive labor overseas, but quality at an efficient price is still going to be a huge issue. 1: http://justinkan.com/exec-errands-post-mortem

It was Magic, they did YC W15! They still exist; they've just pivoted a bit into virtual assistants. They mostly were for normal stuff early on, although Justin Kahn (who invested in them) used to do some weird stuff using Magic: https://justinkan.com/feed/fun-with-magic They're still around: https://getmagic.com/

See also: Justin Kan's attempt at launching a startup competition on Snapchat: https://justinkan.com/snapchat-pitch-competition-359bf25a44a5 (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11678286) And the aftermath by the winner of the competion: https://hackernoon.com/how-to-make-20-000-on-snapchat-and-get-into-y-c…

From: https://justinkan.com/the-founders-guide-to-selling-your-company-a1b20… "When a sufficiently high-up decision maker decides he/she wants to buy your startup, he/she will attempt to meet with you constantly and put time pressure on you, so as to prevent you from shopping the deal and getting a better offer. The absence of this behavior indicates the other company is not serious about acquiring your business." "Letting a potential acquirer interview your team is extremely distracting for them, and signals to the acquirer that you are willing to bend over."

New Startup | San Francisco | Onsite, Visa | Full-time | http://justinkan.com/hiring-ios-programmer-for-stealth-video-app I'm starting a new video startup that has yet to be launched. Small team of 5 people. Looking for talented, self motivated iOS dev to join our team. You will learn a lot about startups! I'm one of the cofounders of Justin.tv, Twitch and a couple other startups, and also a partner at YC. email: [email protected]

It's exceedingly rare for founders to be allowed to take money off the table during these large rounds. According to leaked emails from Sony, investors balked when Evan Spiegel of Snapchat tried to unload $40M in personal shares - just after he had turned down a $3B offer from Facebook. The founder of Twitch wanted to take some money off the table at a ~$200M valuation nine months before it was sold to Amazon for $970M, and he was also rejected [1]. If they aren't giving cash to founders of companies like Snapchat and Twitch, there likely aren't a whole lot of other people that are getting it either. [1] http://justinkan.com/the-99-percent

The job requirements for this are prime: http://justinkan.com/job-post-media-relations-and-snap-god > Why on Earth you’d want to show up at some guy’s house every morning to do this > Any relevant experience you have any how any experience could be relevant for something this inane Definitely made me smile, good way to start the day.

You have Kyle and Brody, just send them a pizza and they get the servers back up! Radical, brahhh, pizza ninja turtle programming! Make sure to send brody extra pepperoni for his sacrifices. [EDIT] In case anyone doesn't get the reference: http://justinkan.com/three-stories

Out of a link from the essay[0]: >Do not enter acquisition talks unless you are ready to sell your company. Negotiating an acquisition is the most distracting thing you can do in a startup: going through M&A is an order of magnitude more distracting than raising money. All of your ability to run the day-to-day operations of your company will grind to a halt. You should only enter an acquisition process if 1) you are certain you want to sell the company and 2) you are likely to get a price you will accept. Don’t talk to potential acquirers “just to see what price you can get.” [0]http://justinkan.com/the-founders-guide-to-selling-your-company

Another 30something here: Just spent the past month forcing myself to understand Snapchat and I finally get it now. Took a bit, especially since the whole experience is heavily gamified. I swear the developers are huge video game junkies! The big takeaway is that Snapchat is just much more personal and real than the text based social networks. For those interested in trying it out I recommend. Mark Suster => https://www.snapchat.com/add/msuster (Venture Capitalist, tech/leadership 'Snapstorms') Justin Kan => https://www.snapchat.com/add/justinkan (creator Justin TV, now Twitch, very open in business/tech) Here is my snapchat as well https://www.snapchat.com/add/mrelijahlynn edit: This article got me to try Snapchat, I was a big fan of Justin TV and streamed a ton of content, including live broadcasts from the Ron Paul Blimp. http://justinkan.com/why-i-love-snapchat Also, this article can get you up to speed on the very different UX => https://bothsidesofthetable.com/snapchat-101-for-vcs-and-old-folks-47f…

again pre-dating the strategy. YC has been actively seeking to grow as fast as it could since 2009-2010, and was funding over 70 companies in a batch as early as 2012, then they scaled back in 2013 after experiencing growing pains. Plenty of well-known companies have come through in that time eg, Pebble, Stripe, Firebase, Parse, Crowdtilt, Coinbase, Instacart. Cruise went through YC in 2014, after the time you (inaccurately) assert was the beginning of the "growth strategy". BTW when Criuse first hit HN, commenters were generally nonplussed or critical [1], just as they had been with Justin.tv (some dude with a camera on his head??) and then Twitch (watching other people play video games??). From the dude with a camera on his head to Twitch's $1Bn exit took 8 years, and even at year 7 people didn't think it was a winner [2]. So, go easy on the new guys hey? :) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7933045 [2] http://justinkan.com/the-99-percent

This format is painful to read, so I'm copying the content here. This is a series of tweets by https://twitter.com/balajis -- If you are using software to go after a legacy physical vertical, we are most excited if you do it "full stack" [0]. With @counsyl, we found that one cannot live by bioinformatics alone. So built a full clinical lab + software + national salesforce. Here is a video of our robotic genome factory: Also: insurance coverage, clearances, clinical integration... [1] The reason to do full stack is that it's hard to replace just one layer of an outdated legacy stack. CAC & integration costs can kill. For example, consider "restaurant powered by technology" vs "tech for restaurants". With code, reinvent industry and make better margins. You cannot automate something till you've done it manually many times. You cannot abstract an API till you've seen many specific examples. Need to build a site of the scale of http://Amazon.com - and encounter all the problems - before you could do http://aws.amazon.com . Reinventing agriculture? Build new kind of farm, w/ solar panels & self-driving tractors. Control all factors, show that code cuts costs. More examples of full stack startups.. Education: [2], Autos: [3], Hospitality: [4] By doing it end-to-end, you see things. First, sometimes a good reason beyond tradition (eg regulatory, logistical) for legacy practices. Second, your control of adjacent layers may eliminate the initial problem you were trying…

Are these really commonly held beliefs? --You only take a job in business operations if you aren’t smart enough to be an engineer (or designer, or product manager, or…) --If your role isn’t technical, you don’t actually understand the product. I don't think many people actually say or believe this. Maybe these were common thoughts in 1999, but as an SF-based ops guy, I've never heard this. In fact, I would argue that good business operators have it just as good, if not better, than most engineers right now. Startups like Uber, Postmates, Airbnb, Dropbox, etc. are killing it, and they all have really talented (and highly paid) people in sales, ops, marketing, support, etc. I think most of us are aware that it takes more than engineers to build a company: http://blog.42floors.com/year-operations-startups/ http://www.cdixon.org/2014/03/15/full-stack-startups/ http://justinkan.com/exec-errands-post-mortem