Readit Newshiphipjorge commented on Ask HN: Suggestions on how to structure working on startup idea as sole engineer · Posted by u/hiphipjorge
I've been thinking about this type of problem recently so very timely question.
IANA Employment Lawyer, so take everything here with a huge grain of salt, but is the separate product going to be a separate company? If it is would some mix of equity + cash work? If not, it seems like some custom contract based on the product and its dedicated revenues/profits might be necessary with lawyers involved.
To zoom out a bit, the problem I've been honing in on is that there are a lot of companies that may want to issue profit-sharing like agreements or revenue share that have no plans to exit/IPO/go huge. But no one, especially early on when they're small or solo, wants to go hire a lawyer to write these contracts. I wonder if we can create good templates for rev/profit shares for solo/indie/bootstrapped businesses. Think the SAFE that YC created, but more around profit or revenue shares. If this is interesting to you shoot me a msg would love to talk to others who are seeing this type of problem.
Also, if you know Gumroad, they're building out a new product called Flexile.com that enables companies to hire contractors but also give them equity/dividends. It's not released yet, but may be worth looking into and getting on the waiting list. May or may not solve this exact problem but it's in a similar realm.
> IANA Employment Lawyer, so take everything here with a huge grain of salt, but is the separate product going to be a separate company? If it is would some mix of equity + cash work? If not, it seems like some custom contract based on the product and its dedicated revenues/profits might be necessary with lawyers involved.
It will be, yes! I do think it should work. I think I'm slightly worried about how much is appropriate given an unspecified time commitment.
> But no one, especially early on when they're small or solo, wants to go hire a lawyer to write these contracts. I wonder if we can create good templates for rev/profit shares for solo/indie/bootstrapped businesses. Think the SAFE that YC created, but more around profit or revenue shares.
Think this is a fantastic idea actually! I think there's a lot of projects out there that would benefit from this type of risk sharing in a way that would make sense for both parties.
> If this is interesting to you shoot me a msg would love to talk to others who are seeing this type of problem.
I'll definitely do that. Let me try to do a bit more research on my part too!
> Also, if you know Gumroad, they're building out a new product called Flexile.com that enables companies to hire contractors but also give them equity/dividends. It's not released yet, but may be worth looking into and getting on the waiting list. May or may not solve this exact problem but it's in a similar realm.
Super interesting. Will go and check it out!
> The speed of history is increasing with each new generation after all.
This is the only statement in the post I honestly disagreed with. Anton is trying to talk about how his coworkers have lost historical perspective and that he, because of the geopolitical situation of the space in which he was born, has more historical perspective and therefore believes that everything might got s**. It's a very valid argument.
Yet, I have 2 questions: - Doesn't the fact that there's a large group of people in the world (in North America, Europe, and other places) that believe in the stability of the system indicate that maybe they're actually experiencing history at a slower pace than their ancestors? - More importantly, isn't the intent to predict history by claiming to understand a change in the way it operates (in this case its speed) also a lack of historical perspective?
Otherwise completely understood the point + liked the idea.
hiphipjorge commented on Sorbet: Stripe's Type Checker for Ruby stripe.com/blog/sorbet-st... · Posted by u/joeyespo
I have some concrete ideas for how to fix shape types to make them not incremental. Just a matter of finding the time to push the prototype over the line, and do a migration on Stripe's codebase to fix or silence the ensuing errors. It's one of the most requested features for sure, and I think once we implement it Sorbet will feel much better to use, especially in smaller projects and scripts where you don't want to have to define `T::Struct` for one-off data structures.
Wow that would be awesome! Shapes/Records are definitely the #1 thing I'm missing from moving over from TypeScript.
I started thinking about this a bit and I came up with the conclusion that the single biggest difference between structs and shapes is really iterating over keys. I spent some time trying to create structs by which you could iterate over all the keys and all the solutions seemed clunky or inelegant.
hiphipjorge commented on Sorbet: Stripe's Type Checker for Ruby stripe.com/blog/sorbet-st... · Posted by u/joeyespo
We've been starting to use Sorbet at Figma and honestly it's been pretty cool! Sorbet is definitely not as good at TypeScript (yet?). It's more verbose, doesn't support things like recursive types and records (shapes are experimental), and it doesn't inspire the same confidence TS does but it's definitely worth it to add it to your codebase if it's big enough!
Also, it's fast! I'm in total agreement with the point made in the article. That makes a huge difference in developer UX.
Personally, I think anyone who amasses oh, say, 100 lifetimes of wealth and can't stop trying to get more has a mental illness. And I don't mean that for laughs. They have a sickness and are not well.
If you've got a $300 million fortune, why can't you just go enjoy life already? It's not like enjoying your life by spending your money isn't going to also create jobs for other people. You don't need to be "a job creator" and build some huge business empire. In fact, it might create better jobs, as you want to buy better things--better furniture, a better home, art--that are not factory-produced crap made by slave labor in other lands. We'd have a better society if rich people could chill out, IMHO.
I see it completely differently.
For a lot of the people that get to that level of wealth, it was never about the money. It was always about something else. I don't think the Bezos, Zuckerbergs, and Musks of the world wake up every morning wanting to make more money. They find fulfillment in their work. The external recognition is not bad either.
I think you're right that some people who want to continue making money are mentally ill, but there are other reasons people continue working. For some, the money is just a byproduct.
> China taxes land appreciation between 30-60%.
If you want support for your causes in the US, you probably don’t want to compare it to a communist regime that scares the crap out of people.
Unless this was sarcastic...?
China does absolutely scare the crap out of both it’s own people and people abroad, but economically it’s clear they’ve done a lot of things right over the last 40 years. The US could learn a thing or two from the communists when it comes to Capitalism.
Their highlighted metrics page: $821M LTM revenue, 46% YoY revenue growth, 18% non-GAAP operating margin, 91% gross margin.
It's an incredible success story, and the engineering they did upfront (primarily led by co-founder Evan Wallace) that set the stage for their success is the stuff of legends. https://madebyevan.com/figma/ has links to numerous blog posts breaking it down, but here are some choice quotes:
> [Evan] developed the hybrid C++/JavaScript architecture for Figma's editor that made it possible to build a best-in-class design tool in the browser. The document representation and canvas area is in C++ while the UI around the canvas is in JavaScript (the team eventually settled on TypeScript + React for this). This let us heavily optimize the document representation to reduce memory usage and improve editing speed while still using modern UI technologies for fast iteration on our UI. C++ development was done using Xcode (not in the browser) to provide a better debugging environment.
> Even though the contents of Figma documents are similar to what HTML can display, Figma actually does all of its own document rendering for cross-browser consistency and performance. Figma uses WebGL for rendering which bypasses most of the browser's HTML rendering pipeline and lets the app work closely with the graphics card. The rendering engine handles curve rendering, images, blurs, masking, blending, and opacity groups, and optimizes for high visual fidelity.
> [Evan] developed Figma's multiplayer syncing protocol, worked on the initial version of the multiplayer live collaboration service (a kind of specialized real-time database), and added multiplayer syncing support to Figma's existing editing application. The initial version was written in TypeScript but [he] later ported it to Rust for improved performance and stability.
It's a great reminder that it's not premature optimization if your UI's fluidity is your distinctive feature and your calling card! And the business acumen to turn this into such a wildly successful product in the context of competitors with kitchen-sink feature lists can't be understated, either. I have an incredible amount of respect for this team, and they should inspire all of us to tackle ambitious projects.
One example of that is something like he adapted a shader we use internally to render font glyphs, which no one has touched ever since. The engineer who told me this had spent a few days trying to understand it and said (after having worked in this area for years) was stumped by it.