Ms.Janet Yellen was the chairman of the Federal Reserve during 2014 till the beginning of 2018.

Remarkable, that there were no economic recessions barely like Great Depression or Subprime mortgage crisis in recent 4 years, although inflation of dollar and unemployment rates are at the mercy of Federal Reserve — and both constitute an enormous power.

We’ve found a collection of Ms.Yellen's speeches when she had not taken the office yet. What were her thoughts about rates cuts? Which interactions may prevent future collapses according her vision?

Read via the link below. There is also a graphic representation of key rates since thirties — pleasant form to recognize these cycles.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/10/09/us/yellen-fed-chart.html

Deploying web-product almost for free on Amazon Web-Services.

If you are planning to get 1000 sessions a day, if every user would make on every session 50 API calls and 50 requests to static assets with an average size of 50Kb, and the total size of stored data is 15Gb, it is possible to adopt upscale and reliable back-end services almost for free for the first 12 months and at couple of dollars beyond.

For instance, AWS Lambda, where you can implement API functions, won’t charge you until 31,250,000 requests are made in month. Definitely enough to cater 1,500,000 requests from our calculations.

DynamoDB offers 25GB of free storage, 25 units of write and 25 units of read capacities without any 12-month boundaries at all. If you are storing 20KB data for every user, you can maintain 1.25 million people under the Free Tier limits and $0.000025 per user thereafter.

AWS S3, which is helpful to store static content like markup or scripts, can provide you with 5 GB of Standard Storage, 20,000 Get Requests, 2,000 Put Requests, and 15 GB of data transfer to CloudFront CDN each month. It is free in a year boundary.

There are bunch of other services you will need. But to current point, $6.35 per month is enough to run and test MVP in 12 months.

Check all this calculations personally on this blog post:
http://p.agnihotry.com/post/the_free_stack_aws/

On the evening rest some good insights are what you probably are missing most. There is a four-year history of startups failure on the web. In case you’ve missed it, visit the link below.

There is an extensive collection of companies that shut down recently: with entrepreneurs goodbyes and lessons they received.

Though the real reasons of failures are hard to uncover, it might be helpful to see how insignificant for the first sight problems may rise to great troubles. And useful to take note on letters, indeed.

https://www.cbinsights.com/research/startup-failure-post-mortem/

How YC works.

It all began when Paul Graham come up with the idea to back up his experience in building companies. He had sold the Viaweb to Yahoo and had left with a considerable sum of money, so nothing could disturb a plan.

It were idealistic essays first. Similar to ones you might have been reading on this page. Then, in 2005 there was initial batch of eight, who entered three-months Summer Founders Program to get funded lately. Eight brave friends, indeed. YC’s investment in those startups $20,000 or less each, depending on how many founders the company had.

In the winter session of 2007 there were 12 startups on board. Four years later — 45. The number kept rising, the attention too, though most startups had failed. Then, after three months of program, teams began preparing to a Demo Day, when each company would present its product to the Valley’s most prominent investors.

Last year YC funded 250 companies. But Sam Altman, current accelerator’s president, says that 1000 and even 10 000 companies was feasible. If each of them was given $100 000 for the stake of 7% after graduation then it would require at least one hundred million dollar, which is not too large sum. Current market valuation of the companies ever passed through acceleration program and continued operating is $100B in total.

One might be confused considering that YC is money-loading machine. As far as every grad got instant access to a network of 1500 companies including Stripe and Dropbox and 3500 founders, the premise is totally wrong. Networking — that is what empowers YC and makes it more like geek version of Bohemian Club, rather than an ordinary trust-bank. After all, you see it.

Read further in this post:
https://www.wired.com/story/y-combinator-has-gone-supernova

There are three categories you will highly likely separate every feature between: metric movers, customer requests and customer delight.

Metric movers are those features, which affect directly on key metrics: engagement, growth and revenue. In the end, this metrics indicate if your product succeeded or not. Typically, you won’t have much of this features, but evaluating them is the prime goal of a product team.

Customer requests are unsurprisingly those features that your clients ask for. You don’t necessarily need to implement each of them, but to listen with humility, deep consideration and implement the most frequent ones.

Customer delight is the least priority feature bucket in fast-growing startups. Every gaining user’s experience thing ought to be here. Evaluate those tasks when company is already profitable and there are enough customers to delight with fancy animation or new design.

The main point to distinguish features into buckets is one crucial and unavoidable question: what for do we schedule this particular task? Provided for the sake of metric movers, do it instantly. Customer requests may wait for some time, but postpone customer delight until this things become customer request.

Read further on this blog post:
https://adamnash.blog/2009/07/22/guide-to-product-planning-three-feature-buckets/

Faction is a group of people which interprets key goal differently than the management team. It put internal aims above the rest, unconsciously fighting over control under the company. Not only large corps face factionalism, but also startups are at risk zone.

As far as root is in the discrepancy in vision, keeping teams low won’t make any good, unless you plan to rise the company by yourself.

Hence, to mitigate inevitable, don’t allow teams play their own internal games, avoid group isolation; promote collaboration and set a competition toward best results in terms of core values.

To prevent, settle recruiting goals. Hire for values fit, that every person would share common principles; but foster cultural diversity, to reach those goals in other ways. For instance, proclaiming quality above the speed will automatically put engineering crew above product and marketing teams.

Encourage connections between people from various departments who otherwise won’t met. Allow transfers between teams for the sake of personal development.

Read further in this comprehensive post about scaling and factions:
http://firstround.com/review/fighting-factions-how-startups-can-scale-without-mutiny/

Feature-oriented startups are dead end projects.

Empirically or by the means of focus-groups, assume you have laid out every feature to emit for the rest of the year. As a visionary entrepreneur, you guided team to make a robust product according to this business plan. Missing one key point, however — today’s needs don’t live too much. Let alone your fellow rivals full of VC cash, who won’t miss the chance to churn the customers.

Wish you had known this before deciding to postpone release of brilliant idea for the sake of extra feature. Anyway, what is the right approach for starting an app, or website, or an offline company?

Our experience tells us to target on the changing landscape of consumer’s needs. Begin with MVP, release as fast as your team can, constantly evolve under feedback pressure and gather metrics to cut unviable ideas. No doubts it’s easy to trap into the pitfall along with to distinguish core value from a temporary feature.

That’s why we strongly recommend to cooperate with experienced product teams not only the Whitescape, but also. For 10 years we have set up at least three successful in-house companies (Riders, Uploadcare, Whitescape) and enhanced the business with IT of a dozen ones. We know the market and technical requirements for almost every MVP to make.

Visit our website to look through out clients: http://whitescape.com
Or you may want to get a feedback about your idea. Feel free to call or write in our facebook page.

Sometimes just tracking a tasks is not enough. To-dos can’t actually show the clear picture because tendency to grow is intrinsic to them.

Working on some rare and uncommon task what we really want to know is if people do already know an appropriate solution or do they still have unknowns that might block the real job ahead.

The Hill metaphor is relevant in this case. Suppose the team is climbing on the hill. They can’t yet know which obstacles will arise, but people have general sense about how far have they already climbed.

Production Hill looks like a chart, similar to a picture of a snake that swallowed an elephant.

Imagine? The left part of this snake is an approach-searching cycle, which solely requires an euristic job. That’s why uphill work is hard to estimate, though you still can mark some key tasks on the way.

To measure a progress ask team members how the feel about how high they have climbed, where the work stands from unknown to known, but count to-dos, which is useless yet.

Downhill phase usually takes 20% of the whole project time. As far as every uncertainty is laid out, deal with to-dos and don’t hesitate.

Read full article with lively examples in this post:
https://m.signalvnoise.com/new-in-basecamp-see-where-projects-really-stand-with-the-hill-chart-ca5a6c47e987

Whitescape’s choice.

What is a dilution, preferences and strike price in the world of venture capital, or why 10% of 100 is not always 10.

Typical allocation of money at a company resembles waterfall: owners of preferred shares are paid first; then common shareholders being rewarded provided the money are left at all; finally common option holders (employees i.e.) get their cash.

Now, consider a company, founded by two fellow people. They issued 10kk shares. Both founders have 50% of the company and 5kk of shares.

At pre-seed round valuation the equity was $500k. Eventually, some brave investor decided to come with $250k. He acquired 5kk of preferred shares and got 33% of the company. Surprised? An investor got only 33% due to dilution as now there are 15kk shares, and both founders got 33,(3)% of the company each too.

Years of working, and big tech gaint come up the mind to buy our promised firm. Till the investor own preferred stocks, there are three options of money allocation:

Low. In case the founders failed and acquisition price is $400k, the investor will receive his $250k back, but founders would be left with $75k each.

Middle. Suppose a company was sold for $750, an investor would be paid $250k and founders $500k — the same as during pre-seed valuation.

And only if the guys (or girls) did well and an equity now $10kk, an investor would has an option to convert his shares to common stock and get 33% ($3.3kk) or keep 33%; founders would receive fair $3.(3) each too.

https://medium.com/@rizstanford/startup-myth-why-isnt-my-stock-worth-2-million-d76449215ae1

Career ladder in small companies is outside.

There’s no room for personall aims to hold for a founder, nor an engineer, nor an accountant. Success or failure in the startup is mutually assured and distributed evenly. It means one shouldn’t focus on the role or status, but act like supportive and flexible person.

It’s wise to choose a promised startup for work to gain knowledge in various fields being a professional. Don't hesitate to offer an experienced person a position in a startup company. Every developer would like to be among the first 100 employees at Google.

These are the key notes from the letter of the Medium CEO written to the team at 2014 in their early beginning:
https://blog.medium.com/why-the-companys-success-should-be-your-focus-52066952f1ec