Life As a CTO of Early Stage Startup

How much equity to give

2011-02-25T13:43:00.000-08:00

Well thought list of things to consider when doling out equity in a startup:

http://groups.google.com/group/lean-startup-circle/msg/a7dd866fda7b66e9

Excerpt:
* How early stage is the startup? Typically, the earlier the greater
equity %
* Do you already have other individuals who are compensated with
equity? If yes, then you know your maximum. VP of sales generally
would get less than the CMO or any other 'C' level executive.
* If you have investors, what do they think?
* How much is left in the options pool? And how many other hires would
you need to make before the next finance round?
* What does your lawyer/accountant think?
* Did you ask the candidate what their expectation is? If you have
several candidates you can compare expectations? Sometimes this can be
a double edge sword but you will get insight into the person's
mindset. And, a VP of sales should be able to handle such direct
questions.
* How crucial will this person be? And how unique are they?
* Will they be getting salary in addition to equity compensation?
Getting paid often reduces equity awards.
* Where is the startup located? Europe is different than the U.S. and
even Silicon Valley differs from NY's Silicon Alley.
* What is your current vesting schedule? Longer schedules are
sometimes offset by a larger payout
* Have you considered alternatives to equity such as bonuses, revenue
share, etc.

ant build file for android

2011-01-11T12:43:00.000-08:00

a. create a build.xml file
go to root of your project and run
> android update project --path .

create secure.properties file and add to it
key.store=keystore
key.alias=aliasname
key.store.password=password
key.alias.password=password

add to build.xml

create signed package:
> ant release

how to woo bloggers to write about you

2011-01-07T15:44:00.000-08:00

http://groups.google.com/group/lean-startup-circle/msg/b2f209aa0483849a

Excerpts:

The Pitch
1) Be Honest about why you're approaching the blogger - ie, we just created
this new xp tracking gizmo and wanted your thoughts about it since you blog
about xp/financial topics. I'd like to give you a free permanent account to
review in your own time.
2) Clearly state your offer - We're in the alpha/beta stage and looking for
feedback so if you'd like to share with your readers we would really
appreciate it. .
3) Try to Establish an ongoing relationship - We definitely appreciate your
time and would like to keep you updated on our progress, if that's ok with
you.

Metrics Tracking
1) Try to use at least 3 different pitch variants to a small sample of
different bloggers (say 24).
2) Track each variant a,b,c
3) Based on which has the most success response, optimize to that variant
and expand the target size.

stop php deprecated warnings in browser

2010-05-07T20:48:00.000-07:00

I just installed newest version of wamp server on a new windows 7 machine. When I installed the web app, I got a bunch of following printouts in the browser at the top of every webpage:

Deprecated: Assigning the return value of new by reference is deprecated in [...]\cake\libs\inflector.php on line xxx

After spending an hour looking, here is what worked:

1. in cake/lib/object.php: add following in next line after <&ques;php

error_reporting(E_ALL ^ E_DEPRECATED);

2. in cake/libs/configure.php replace

error_reporting(E_ALL);

with

error_reporting(E_ALL ^ E_DEPRECATED);

3. in your php.ini, search for error_reporting and replace the entire line with

error_reporting = E_ALL & ~E_DEPRECATED

svn webdav - view previous revisions

2010-04-12T00:12:00.000-07:00

So, if you want to see the previous revision for path
https://svn.company.com/platform/trunk/app/webroot/images/welcome/

Use this URL:
https://svn.company.com/platform/!svn/bc/2615/trunk/app/webroot/images/welcome/

Where 2615 is the revision number I want to see.

160043 "Could not open the requested SVN filesystem"

2010-01-28T20:25:00.000-08:00

After about a year since we set up subversion server, I needed to create a new project. So I ran

>svnadmin create myproject

We have svn hooked with apache - that is, https protocol.

When I tested the new url in a browser, I got the following error:

160043 "Could not open the requested SVN filesystem"

I found a lot of posts on the web that discussed this error message, but none suggested a solution other than upgrading svn and apache builds.

Since existing projects were working fine, I didn't see the need to upset my stable environment.

When I looked at apache logs, I saw the message:

Expected FS format between '1' and '3'; found format '4'

So that give me the hint - what search results for error 160043 were saying was correct, the version of apache's svn mod and svn server doesn't match. What they didn't tell me (or I missed the search result that did mention it) was that the easier fix is to create the project as follows:

>svnadmin create myproject --pre-1.5-compatible

This solved the problem for me.

Cakephp slow on Windows Vista

2009-11-01T00:02:00.001-07:00

I use Vista for development. I find that cakephp development on Vista is painfully slow. Some of my coworkers use mac. I, being a (relatively) poor entrepreneur cannot afford a mac (yet), so I have no option but to keep waiting for page to load for sometimes upto 60 seconds.

I tried various ways to handle the problem - apc and xcache both didn't work with my version of php and apache on windows. Then one day it occurred to me - apc is just an elaborate in-memory cache, so why dont I put my cakephp cache files in memory?
So started search for a (free) RAM Disk. After trying few, I found Dataram RAM Disk was the only one that didn't crash on Vista. Those folks have done a good job with their product. I just need a 10M disk, so their free option works well for my dev server.

Next updated the core.php with:

      Cache::config('_cake_core_', array(
              'engine' => 'File',
              'path'=> 'E:/',
     ));

First few times were still painfully slow, but as cache filled up, the website now loads blazing fast. I can now again develop on Vista!

Android - detect device on Vista 64 bit

2009-09-28T00:35:00.001-07:00

I spent few hours trying to get it to work. Here are the instructions that helped:

I got these from the following link:

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=502010&page=21

First set up environment variable:

In VISTA hit WindowKey + Pause\Break to bring up the system properties
Click Advanced System Settings
Under The Advanced Tab click Environment Variables
Click the New button below the System Variables panel.
In the New System Variable dialog box, type devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices in the Variable Name text box and 1 in the Variable Value box.
Click OK, then OK again to close that Window

Now device manager:

Now go to the device manager and go to View > Show Hidden Devices
Look under Hard Drives and delete the HTC Android Phone USB Device
** This may show up as Generic Mass Storage **
Note: When trying to delete the USB controller for the phone, have the phone plugged in first and see how many usb devices are actually conected. Once you disconnect the phone, you will obviously have 1 less connected device. Plug the phone in 1 more time and see which one is now connected and delete just that one. This will help avoid having to reinstall a bunch of usb devices.
Look Under Portable Devices and delete the Android Phone
Look Under Universal Serial Bus Controllers and Delete ANY USB Mass Storage Devices with a greyed out icon ... one if these is for your phone....
Now with the device manager still open ... unplug and plug your phone in. When the window pops up, choose the android 1.6r1 usb driver directory for the device driver dialog.

vi - global search and replace?

2009-05-29T19:17:00.000-07:00

I use vi heavily. Every time I have to do global search and replace, I have to do google search first. So documenting it here:

:%s/lookForMe/ReplaceWithMe/g

Subversion - query what files will be updated

2009-05-02T18:11:00.001-07:00

Another subversion entry!
Before I push changes out to the production website, I wanted to see what files will get pushed out. So I wanted to see if I run svn update, which files will be updated. I was hoping to find something like 'svn update 'dry run'" or 'svn update -query'.

So I looked hard at 'svn update' documentation but still didn't find anything. After a few searches on the manual, the command turned out to be on the least expected svn command. So, the summary is - if you want to see what svn update will do, run this command:
svn status -u

subversion checksum mismatch problem

2009-04-23T17:01:00.001-07:00

I got hit with the subversion checksum mismatch error again today. I had faced this problem couple of weeks ago, but just checked out a new copy to avoid fixing the problem at that time. Today I thought I would dig deeper.

I saw two variations:
svn: Checksum mismatch for 'aaa'; expected: 'xxxxx', actual: 'yyy'
And:
Checksum mismatch while updating

I did few searches, and found that people had fairly complex set of steps to fix this. A simpler solution suggested was to check out a clean copy of your files, and then copy over all your changed files from the problem copy to your new copy. This was also painful for me because I had changes all over my working copy, and not just in the problem directory.

After looking at the svn files I found that the easy solution that worked for me (still involved checkout) was to
1. checkout a clean copy
2. for new and your problem checkouts, go to the folder where your svn mismatch error is thrown
3. in that folder, go to .svn folder
4. copy the entries file over from the clean copy.
5. svn cleanup on the problem folder
6. svn update

phpUnderControl, CruiseControl and Jetty - No context on this server matched handled this request

2009-03-29T15:10:00.000-07:00

I am tryin to get phpUnderControl set up, and for that I needed to get Cruisecontrol working.
I installed Cruisecontrol, set up phpUnderControl (there are enough instructions out there), but let me know if you want me to do a writeup)
After putting all pieces together in a VirtualHost, I go to cc.myserver.com and I get:
Error 404 - Not Found.
No context on this server matched or handled this request.

I looked around quite a bit, but didn't find the answer. Going to Jetty forums, finally, I pieced together that Jetty doesn’t get configured with a default context automatically. So here is what I did:
go to /opt/cruisecontrol (where I have cruisecontrol installed)
cd webapps
ln -s cruisecontrol root

Restart cruisecontrol and now cc.myserver.com loads the cruisecontrol nicely.

Ignoring svn entries in Cakephp

2009-01-14T12:08:00.000-08:00

If you are trying to protect the svn related files so that they dont get shown in a browser, here is what worked for me after trying various things:

RewriteRule ^(.*/)*\.svn/(.*) - [F,L]

Making Cakephp and Shindig work together

2009-01-14T12:04:00.000-08:00

So we decided to use Shindig for our web console widgets. There is lot of documentation on how to make shindig work as a virtualhost.

However, I didnt find complete documentation on how to make it work as a Alias (say www.domain.com/shindig/xxxx)
Where your Cakephp app runs at www.domain.com/

So basically, we have cakephp running as virtual host and our gadgets/widgets will be provided by shindig using the url www.domain.com/shindig/gadgets/ifr

Just few days ago, I read an interesting point in a performance article on Android code site - (paraphrasing) there are two phases of learning to developing on a new platform - first step is to make it work, second step is to make it work the right way.

So here is what I did and made it work - now you readers tell me how to make it work the right way.

I did svn co of Shindig in my downloads directory.
From there, I exported the following directories into vendors/shindig directory of my cake app.
- config
- features
- javascript
- php

So far so good.

In shindig/php/.htaccess file have the following line uncommented:
RewriteRule (.*) /shindig/index.php [L]

In shindig/php/config/container.php update as follows:
'web_prefix' => '/shindig',
'default_js_prefix' => '/shindig/gadgets/js/',
'default_iframe_prefix' => '/shindig/gadgets/ifr?',

In shidig/config/container.js, change all occurences of %host% with %host%/shindig. When I did it, there were 5 instances.

Now the shindig side is updated.

Next we need to tell Cakephp to ignore shindig urls. So, in your root .htaccess file
add
RewriteRule ^shindig/.*$ - [L]
Getting this to work took me a good part of the day. But hey, I now know how mod rewrite works, which I never bothered to learn till now.

Last part, we need to update the apache virtual host, so I added the following block:

Alias /shindig /dev/coolproduct/vendors/shindig/php
<Directory /dev/coolproduct/vendors/shindig/php>
</Directory>

Now, I put in a sample container and a widget, which I can load using:
http://local.domain.com/shindig/gadgets/files/coolappsamplecontainer/coolappsamplecontainer.html

IPhone development - Global variables in Objective C

2009-01-01T18:34:00.000-08:00

This one took me few hours, so I hope this post saves someone time.

So while developing our app for iphone, I decided to use static variable (probably a bad design choice, but I wanted to get the concept working and fix the code later). Anyhow. I found that using global static variables in Objective-C is obvious, but only if you know what you are doing.

For a newbie like me, who skimmed the Objective-C manual, and did read that there is something called retain, forgot about it when I actually needed it.

The problem was that I was setting the value in one View, but it was showing up empty on the other side. To add insult to injury, the iphone simulator showed all kind of weird exceptions, which I could not find any explanation yet. For example, it was crashing without any clear explanation. In few times, I saw NSCRArray length selector being invalid as reason for crash.

So, to have a global variable, this is what I did that worked:

In Globals.h:
extern NSString *gProp;

In Globals.m:
NSString *gProp;

In ViewThatHasABigWidgetThatSetsThisGlobalViewController.m:
-(void)someMethod
{ gProp = [textFieldvalue retain]; }

In ViewThatUsesThisGlobalViewController.m:
-(void)someMethod
{ NSString *textFieldValue = gProp; }

Change MySQL Timezone

2008-12-13T16:34:00.000-08:00

If your server is in a different timezone, a quick fix is to update the timezone of the server. I did that previously, but that turned out is not enough. I had to change the timezone of mysql daemon too. Here is how I did it:

SET GLOBAL time_zone = 'America/Los_Angeles';

SET SESSION time_zone = 'America/Los_Angeles';

Check it using:
SELECT @@global.time_zone, @@session.time_zone;

shindig and ssl

2008-12-12T21:40:00.000-08:00

For our website, we are looking at some gadget/widget frameworks. First thing I tried was shindig from apache.

I had some trouble getting it to work, so I thought I will document the workaround, in case someone else has the same problem.
Note that in the end, the problem turned out to be different versions of openssl in apache and php, but here is how to work around it.

What caused the problem?
I like portable apps. So that whenever I change/upgrade my machine, I just copy my 'dev' directory to new machine, and my whole development environment is avaialble out of box.
I had set up apache and php about 2 years ago. Over time, as I played with various apps, lot of fat was added, not all of which jive together (notably openssl in this context).

So, to try out shindig, I downloaded the package and followed instructions from this site:
http://incubator.apache.org/shindig/#php

I turned on curl and openssl in php.ini, by uncommenting extensions for curl and openssl.

I configured virtal domain shindig.com and then I hit this url in a browser:
http://shindig.com/shindig/php/gadgets/ifr?url=http://www.labpixies.com/campaigns/todo/todo.xml

I got this error message:
Shindig requires the openssl extention, see http://www.php.net/openssl for more info

Without SSL, I got the above message, but with SSL, apache showed alert with this message whenever I tried to start apache.
"The ordinal 3879 could not be located in the dynamic link library LIBEAY32.dll"

I tried various things, but then I didn't really need ssl at this point, so here is what I did. I went into the shindig code, and found that I could work around the problem. Here is how:

In shindig/php/index.php
look for openssl, and change it like this:

//$modules = array('json', 'SimpleXML', 'libxml', 'curl', 'openssl');
$modules = array('json', 'SimpleXML', 'libxml', 'curl');

That's it. When I will need ssl, I will handle that, but for now, I can keep playing with shindig.

How to change Redhat Linux timezone

2008-11-30T15:46:00.001-08:00

Our dedicated server is in CST timezone, so we thought of changing the timezone to PST, where we are. Here are the instructions I followed:

#timeconfig

This is a visual way of setting the timezone, but I am not sure if it actually did anything.

So, I tried manual way by following these steps:
#mv /etc/localtime /etc/localtime-old
#ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Pacific /etc/localtime
#rdate -s time.nist.gov

Because of our server firewall, the above step timedout. So I tried the following, which timed out too:
#ntpdate pool.ntp.org

So I set the time manually, and then synced the hardware clock:
#date -s "3:38"
#hwclock --systohc --utc
#hwclock --show

Redmine - email notification auth error

2008-11-20T10:13:00.001-08:00

If you want to set up email notification and you are get the following error

504 5.3.3 AUTH mechanism LOGIN not available

Edit your config/email.yml
and comment out the authentication line:
#authentication: :login

Also, I found that for address value, localhost didnt work. I got the following error:
getaddrinfo Name or service not known

So either add entry for localhost 127.0.0.1 in hosts,
or what I did was just specify address value as:
address: 127.0.0.1

cakephp - ignoring tmp from subversion

2008-11-13T17:43:00.000-08:00

Some files like contents of tmp need to be ignored from versioning system like subversion.

I was being lazy, so instead of figuring it out, I did a google search and found this blog post that does exactly that:
http://pjhile.com/ignoring-cakephps-tmp-directory-with-subversion#comments

Basically, here is the command I used from that post:
svn propset svn:ignore 'tmp' .
svn ci -m 'Ignoring "tmp" directory.'

mod rewrite and virtual hosts (and displaying html in post)

2008-11-12T12:02:00.001-08:00

So we are using cakephp, which uses mod rewrite. I am still very new to cakephp, and have mixed feelings.

Anyhow, I spent about an hour trying to figure out why cake php didnt work when we pushed our first version to QA server. So I hope this saves someone an hour.

I narrowed it down to simply mod rewrite was not configured correctly.

Further digging proved that I have to put a 'directory' directive too if I am using virtualhost. That did the trick.
So here is what my working virtualhost looks like:

<virtualhost>
DocumentRoot /usr/local/qa/app/webroot/
ServerName qa.example.com
ErrorLog logs/qa-error_log
CustomLog logs/qa-access_log common
<directory>
AllowOverride All
</directory>
</virtualhost>

As a PS, just in case if wondering: to display html in a post, I replaced <, > with html lt and gt respectively.

typos or errors in apache conf file

2008-11-11T17:49:00.000-08:00

While editing the conf files, I always used to restart/reload the config, then go to error log to see the line number with typo/error; I found that there is a simpler way
apachectl -t
(can also take -f file-name)

Charter

2008-11-10T19:14:00.001-08:00

I am going to use this blog to document little things I learn here and there as a CTO and cofounder of an early stage technology startup.

Mostly it will have things about technology that took me few hours to figure out, but its not limited to anything in specific.

This blog is also to reach out to other entrepreneurs out there.