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!

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“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.

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Two years ago, when the Nintendo Wii was consistently sold out in retail stores, anxious parents looked to websites like eBay and Amazon to buy this popular video game system for the holiday season. eBay sellers and resellers who somehow had access to a fresh supply of Wiis enjoyed a healthy stream of arbitrage-based profit by marking up prices. Upon the goading, nagging, and begging of their kids, these moms and dads were willing to pay through the roof for this coveted toy, in many cases over 200% the retail price. The average Wii selling price on eBay was $500 and in several cases of desperation broke $1000.

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The last time you flashed someone a peace sign or a thumbs up, you weren’t worried about committing a trademark violation. These signals are squarely in the public domain. However, if you were considering touching your index fingers and thumbs together and spreading your hands, palms outward, into a diamond, I would think twice. In the eyes of the law, you would be a thief.

That is an exaggeration. You would really only draw fire if you attempted to profit from the gesture in any way. This is because this hand sign has already been trademarked by Shawn Carter, the New York rapper better known to the world as Jay-Z. Mr. Carter has four registered trademarks on this hand-sign (#3584075, #3584076, #3568293, and #3568294 if you want to look them up yourself) protect his exclusive right to this particular design as it is used in clothing, apparel, and digital media.

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Mary, an American woman visiting London sees a pair of Giuseppe Zanotti boots in a Kensington shop. Rather than buy them on the spot, she logs onto Zappos.com from her hotel and buys the same pair in a size 7 Nero for $995.00. She pays for them by credit card and has them shipped to her home in New York City. What corporate tax will Zappos.com have to pay?

This is a common problem that many internet retailers have faced. The reality of the situation is that not all tax authorities agree on the answer. The good news, however, is that certain rules do apply as to who can tax a transaction under older rules that applies to buying goods by mail order or other service in different locations.

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Times are tough right now for newspapers across North America. For instance, the Toronto Star recently cut a fifth of its staff, consisting of 78 jobs in total, and plans on replacing the lost production content through outsourcing. Papers also continue to shift more resources to online content, as the traditional newspaper publication model is proving to be too costly.

Much to the dismay of many entrepreneurs starting an LLC in New York, a New York law mandates that such newly formed LLCs subsidize local publications by forcing the LLCs to publish notices of their recent formation. All newly formed LLCs (domestic and foreign) must post notices in two authorized publications within 120 days of forming the LLC. The notice must be published in the county of the LLC’s principal office at least one day of every week for six weeks in two publications, one weekly and one daily.

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“In economics and finance, arbitrage is the practice of taking advantage of a price differential between two or more markets: striking a combination of matching deals that capitalize upon the imbalance, the profit being the difference between the market prices.”
- Wikipedia

One of the great things about being a kid is that you can do lots of entrepreneurial experiments with each failure having little consequence. My first venture failed at the age of 9. The failure didn’t feel insignificant at the time, but the lessons learned from it turned out to be an excellent return on time and effort invested.

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We are building software to make all manner of business administration easier – particularly for people who have never done it before.

To do this, we study volumes of legal material, model scores of existing companies and hunt down business anomalies wherever we can find them. We then distill the rules and best practices across hundreds of jurisdictions and industries into simple building blocks.

In our research we come across many topics and issues that could use better explanation and examples. The web has plenty of sources for the definitions of concepts like S-Corp and option pools but they are usually painful for the novice or useless for the expert.

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