I'm pretty blown away at the $30-50k for the first engineering hires. I assume they are either:<p>A) getting LOTS of equity
B) really naive about equity<p>Are any of the startups here paying their first hires in this range? If so, what kind of equity package are they getting?
This is a great article, but keep in mind that the numbers are illustrative of one type of company. Mint was dealing with financial information, so they had to get "serious" fast and that means spending on things that, say, a Facebook or Twitter would not have had to spend. They project $30/per user for user acquisition (if I read that right), which again is very different for different kinds of companies, and different business models. Extremely high value niche companies would pay hundreds of dollars per user. On the other side Twitter being a mass player, would spend far, far less. Financial sites are valuable, so $30 seems like a good deal.
The legal fees are kind of astounding. $10-50K/month in legal fees for a 30 person company? We spend <i>maybe</i> $2.5-5k/year on legal fees for our three person company after the initial $20k operating agreement/TOS/PP/copyright. The $10-50k/m figure seems a bit outrageous to me. Can someone with more experience than me explain that in more detail?
That woman is so freaking beautiful I can't concentrate on the article. I had to firebug/edit html her picture out so I could get it done.<p>After reading it: It was a nice look into the strategy/numbers but I am not sure I can take anything away from it. Like (pretty much) everyone else here being a programmer/developer - I do not see raising $100k for my prototype as feasible for me.