Paul, thanks for the reply. I know that YC is not the end-all be-all, but I do think it would be a great way to increase our chance of success. I don't think my co-founder is lame at all. Actually he's a super smart guy, we have known each other for 7 years, and have started and sold one moderately successful startup together during college.
What is frustrating that maybe you didn't understand before is that we're not working together now as it is (in two different cities ... at least a 2hr plane away). For my own saneness, team energy, and for the sake of teamwork, I thought that moving to YC would be a great opportunity for us to actually work in the same room together, and have support all around. I know that if that happens, we will do great things.
btw ... I'm gonna apply anyway. So, you'll hear from me again soon.
Yep, I agree with your advice and I also read PG's recent article that you referenced. Totally agree.
I have talked with the team, and we seem to all understand that this is not going the way we want. I have made it clear that I will be looking for others to join in a "co-founder" capacity if I get the opportunity to go to YC this winter. They are reasonable people and good friends, so I don't think it will be a big problem to do a little equity restructuring if its in the best interest of the startup.
My real question is not "am I screwed?" because I already know that. I'm asking "how can I fix this now?" or, in other words "please help me find a new co-founder and a chance to get into YC (or another good startuppy environment)."
We were in a similar situation in the last YC funding cycle. 5 founders, 3 were not willing to quit their day jobs or move to Boston for the SFP. It absolutely is a problem - the first thing PG shot back was "Too many uncommitted founders!", and we didn't get accepted (or even interviewed). It'll likely be a problem without YC too: you end up spending more time ensuring that everyone's on the same page than actually building the project. We sped up noticeably after we dropped from 5 founders to 2.
I can't really help find a new cofounder (other than reiterate what others have said: ask around here, check cofoundr.com, etc.), but I can tell you what we did. We (my surviving cofounder and I) bought out the other 3 founders for $1000 apiece. In retrospect this was probably too high, given how quickly they accepted. But it was done mostly to preserve good relations and make sure nobody felt they were being cheated, and I think it succeeded in that. When our incorporation papers come through there will be a few agreements for them to sign to make sure we own the stuff they did before we bought them out.
Do you even have ownership of the project at this point? Don't all these others have a claim to it? Are you prepared to buy them out and/or completely start from scratch?
I do not have complete ownership, no. Co-founder has an equal stake as currently, but we have a prearranged agreement where I will be entitled to more equity upon our first financing. I don't really want to throw them out ... they are good at what they do (just not doing enough, in my opinion). I don't think it would be a problem to come to an agreement to redistribute equity.
Because I'd be hugely interested in working with a "cofounder" who broadcast his unhappiness with his previous team to a public forum as a vehicle to replace them. That guy sounds like a real rock star.
He is a rock star - and one of the most dedicated people I know. From what I've seen, he's more committed to this project than anyone else who's worked on it (including me).
However the tone of your post doesn't surprise me - you probably wouldn't understand the difficult position he's in unless you've been there before.
searching GoDaddy for a good domain, we stumbled on wamily.com and it was available and so perfect. Wamily = "Web Family". The choice of the name actually helped us shape the product.
Hmm ... good point. I honestly don't know, I just took the notes. He did say that Cork'd was sold to another company and the presenter wasn't working on it anymore. Maybe they changed something. I'm not too familiar with the Cork'd site aside from this presentation.
Haha, I have actually met Sam several times, slept on the floor of his apartment once or twice, almost crashed his Segway, took his money playing poker, and got drunk with him, so I can vouch for his existence. At one point he actually wrote one or two lines of code for Wamily, but was always on YC news all the time we had to let him go.
On my site we require every user to pick a username, but users can log in with their username OR email address. This allows us to keep email addresses private, but also makes it easy for users who just can't or dont want to remember their username.
It's a simple regexp in your login controller to figure out if what they typed in should be checked against the email address or username field in your users table.
On most sites it's difficult for a bad guy to discover the email addresses of your users (they're private). It's trivial to discover the usernames (they're public). With thousands (or millions) of users it's not hard for a bad guy to find accounts with weak passwords. Probably wise to make sure you have decent password constraints and a way of preventing brute-force logins.
I've been having a hellofa time getting Hotmail to not mark messages sent from my app as junk/spam. This tool will verify that the various authentication techniques used by the big email providers will pass, increasing your chances of getting through the spam filters.
SPF is pretty simple to set up, you just need to add an entry into your DNS that specifies which IPs are authorized senders for your domain. Go to http://www.openspf.org/ and start the setup wizard.
Sender ID is almost the same as SPF, but Microsoft found a way to fk it up. There's info about Sender ID on the site above, and also on http://microsoft.com/senderid
Domainkeys is a little more complex to install, requiring modules or plugins to your mail server. A search should give you enough info to get started.
Sweet, thanks for the tip. I just installed inkscape and it looks awesome. I have been looking for a good drawing tool for linux, this might be it. Can't believe I never heard of it before!
What is frustrating that maybe you didn't understand before is that we're not working together now as it is (in two different cities ... at least a 2hr plane away). For my own saneness, team energy, and for the sake of teamwork, I thought that moving to YC would be a great opportunity for us to actually work in the same room together, and have support all around. I know that if that happens, we will do great things.
btw ... I'm gonna apply anyway. So, you'll hear from me again soon.