When it comes to option pools, founders and investors care about how the pool affects the company’s valuation, what the company looks like fully diluted, and what happens to the options in an acquisition. There are a lot of great posts out there regarding what founders and investors should be aware of regarding option pools.

As an employee with stock options, you don’t need an in-depth understanding of all the issues surrounding option pools. In fact, all you really need to know is how much of the company you’re going to own. However, understanding a little bit about option pools will give you some useful insight to where the company is going and your future prospects.

Everybody knows April 15th is tax day. Most people fear it and spend lots of hours worrying about it. It’s fair to say that only tax preparers and the IRS look forward to the day, leaving the general public to sweat it out weeks beforehand.

The truth is, April 15th is not the only “tax day” to be aware of when you run your own business. The IRS has many deadlines throughout the year for businesses to consider.

For example, if a C Corporation expects to make a certain amount of money over the course of the year, it will owe estimated taxes for that year in quarterly installments. In 2009, any C Corp expecting to owe at least $500 in taxes for the year was required to file estimated taxes for each quarter. Individuals can owe quarterly estimated taxes as well; these are usually withheld from the paychecks of salaried employees. If you are self-employed, however, you may owe an individual quarterly estimated tax return in addition to your corporation’s. LLCs and S Corps don’t file estimated tax — their profits flow through to the shareholders, who pay estimated tax for individuals.

Many companies issue their employees equity, or stock, as part of an overall compensation package. Two of the most popular forms of equity granted to employees are stock options (the right to purchase the stock at a set price) and restricted stock units, or RSUs (stock that is owned by the employee outright after working with the company for a set amount of time). While there are many considerations when choosing between options and RSUs, one of the most important things to keep in mind is how, and when, each is taxed.

Unlike most states, New York offers free registered agent services provided by the Secretary of State. Private RAs are left to convince businesses that their services are superior to the Secretary of State’s.

The primary difference between the Secretary of State and a good private RA is speed. The Secretary of State’s office notifies you of service of process by mail. A private RA may offer more immediate notification methods, such as by phone or email. Other services may include electronic record keeping and customer support.

Banks are not always easy to deal with, but at least they’re predictable. I’ve set up small business bank accounts in +5 countries and although requirements differ, there are certain fundamental rules of thumb I try to follow each time.

1. Don’t Be a Stranger

If you already have a personal account with the bank, the set-up process will be much smoother and quicker. Their system knows you and that goes a long way for the banks. In addition, if it is your existing bank, you will be familiar with how they work (or do not work) and know how to navigate their internal bureaucracy and online banking systems. Banks have lots of packages and offerings for small businesses, but at the end of the day they are very similar. If any of the rules of thumb below hugely favor another bank, then switch.

Your company hires a registered agent to be the bearer of bad news. It’s strange, but true. Mail from your RA can only mean a few things, none of which you’re looking forward to. The mail could be an annual report notice, which means paperwork. Or it could be tax forms. In rare cases, it could be notice that you’re getting sued.

There is good news. Your RA is actually a friend. When you get mail from your RA you know it’s something that deserves immediate attention. Your RA won’t be sending you any junk mail. Imagine missing a tax filing, or even worse, failing to respond to a lawsuit. Those mistakes have real financial teeth. An agent dedicated to making sure you get notice of those types of things can only be a good thing.

When setting up a new company it can be surprisingly difficult to get an overview of what fees you will be paying, who you will be paying them to and when you will be paying them.

Even though the fee system in the U.S. varies between service providers and states, there are many similarities between them. Fees can generally be classified in two categories: (i) set-up fees and (ii) maintenance fees. Set-up fees are one-off fees which you incur when setting up your company and maintenance fees are fees which you will be paying each year.

Tiger Woods’ website prominently features his handwritten signature. He also “signs” each of his blog posts with the same signature image. This signature can easily be copied, reused, and misused. I can “sign” this post just like he does.

I can also take this image and print it out on a contract. Perhaps I may need to do some photoshop tricks to make it look more authentic, but bottom line is that a handwritten signature or its image isn’t very secure.

Names keep entrepreneurs up at night. I recently read this post about Redmonk Development’s odyssey to claim ownership of their chosen handle. While their case never went to court, it took seven years for them to receive full web domain rights to their name after a slow and frustrating process of securing the official hand-over from the previous owner of redmonk.net and @redmonk.

This reminded me of another “what’s in a name” battle that I witnessed play out in a very different venue. In late 2002, I went to a punk show in my Texas hometown to see American Nightmare, a Boston band I had seen play the year before. I ended up seeing American Nothing, a band noticeably weighed down by litigation.

Founders often make a critical mistake when they setup a company: they forget to create a vesting schedule for themselves.

Usually it happens for a practical reason. When founders fill out the incorporation documents they list themselves as shareholders and, by default, these shares have no restrictions. An entirely separate contract must be drawn up and signed for the founders to create a vesting schedule. This costs money.

Back when John Hancock signed the US Declaration of Independence in 1776, contracts were drafted by hand and signed by hand. Now, over 200 years later, lawyers usually draft contracts on a word processor and then print them out to sign. They may use spell checking, cut and paste templates, but the process is still lawyer creates contract, paper version printed and then signed by hand.

Our goal is to change this. As a legal product, “declaring independence” is not common, while another product, Incorporation, is quite common with thousands of companies incorporating every day. The legal contract creation involved is repetitive, making this an ideal process for us to automate.

“Business art is the step that comes after Art. I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist.”

Andy Warhol recognized the undercurrent of business running through the New York art world long before his contemporaries. Even as the banner of Abstract Expressionism was raised high by artists and the US establishment alike, Warhol envisioned a cool, detached idiom wholly alien to the passionate spontaneity of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman. In 1957, less than a year after Pollock’s death, Warhol incorporated Andy Warhol Enterprises, Inc., and went on to single-handedly create an artistic philosophy that would influence generations of “business artists.”

Cory logs onto Etsy and purchases a pair of artisan-made cufflinks for $80. Shipping to his house in San Francisco costs an additional $3.50 USD. Though Etsy is a Brooklyn-based company, the seller, Oak, is located in Boston. What sales and use taxes do Cory, Etsy and Oak owe?

A hot red sports car that bleeds sex and speed ambles past Tiananmen Square. Perched on the hood is a logo of a horse rearing on two feet. Everyone who has fantasized about buying a dream car knows the name Ferrari and could pick out its horse logo faster than Seabiscuit.

However, China’s 1st Intermediate Court and the Review Board were apparently deprived of such decadent daydreams. Ferrari was unsuccessful when it opposed and later appealed a merchandiser’s registration of the Ferrari horse emblem. Both levels of court ruled that the horse emblem was not a famous trademark warranting protection. Notices by the Supreme Court in recent years have explained that well known trademarks are evaluated on the basis of whether they are well known within China, not worldwide.

“A statement of the financial position of an administration for a definite period of time based on estimates of expenditures during the period and proposals for financing them b : a plan for the coordination of resources and expenditures c : the amount of money that is available for, required for, or assigned to a particular purpose.” – Definition of “Budget” by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary

A lot of things can kill a business. Not taking the time to do a proper budget is a fundamental one. Relying on lenience from your creditors when this happens is another one.

The first day of work at Google holds so much promise. I planned an upstart 20% project that would redesign the search results page and raise the collective IQ of the world. I imagined Gmail groupies, playing foosball with geo-location savants and creating custom agents for auto-bidding in auctions. I wondered if I should do laps in a McDonald’s ball pit to prepare myself for my new Willy Wonka life.

But mostly I just wanted to work with the best technology people in the world. Day one did not disappoint. In orientation I found myself sitting across from Paul Rademacher. Paul freakin Rademacher!

“Debugging is twice as hard as writing the program, so if you write the program as cleverly as you can, by definition, you won’t be clever enough to debug it.”

-Brian Kernighan (the first publisher of “hello, world” and the K in AWK)

As a tech startup, each engineering hire is extremely important. We’re writing clever programs to solve real-world problems, so if there’s any merit to the quote above, we better keep hiring new engineers that are at least twice as clever as we are today. Here’s our process for finding those superprogrammers. The first step is to answer a programming problem that we send by email. The next step is to come in for an interview.