Thanks for speaking up, contributing your viewpoint on HN and not attacking me.
I'm sorry to hear your employer deciding to not to work with you on this and I hope they reconsider, bring you back on and dealing with it constructively.
For context, I'm a developer evangelist.
That means I'm an advocate for developers, male and female. While I hear abou demanding bosses with impossible deadlines for product launches, I also hear about the experiences of women working at startups.
In both cases I offer suggestions, ideas and mentoring to help the developers become problems solvers. Sometimes the answer is our API or not answering email after 7pm while other times it about being assertive and shedding impostor syndrome.
The forking joke set the stage for the dongle joke.
Yes, this time I decided I didn't want to argue my perspective. I decided instead to accept it bothered me and took action based on the PyCon Code of Conduct. It sounds like if I'd said something about the forking you would have denied it having a sexual association. Not sure if I smiled but I'm also unsure what facial expression you would have expected.
Hi, I'm the guy who made a comment about big dongles. First of all I'd like to say I'm sorry. I really did not mean to offend anyone and I really do regret the comment and how it made Adria feel. She had every right to report me to staff, and I defend her position. However, there is another side to this story. While I did make a big dongle joke about a fictional piece hardware that identified as male, no sexual jokes were made about forking. My friends and I had decided forking someone's repo is a new form of flattery (the highest form being implementation) and we were excited about one of the presenters projects; a friend said "I would fork that guys repo" The sexual context was applied by Adria, and not us.
My second comment is this, Adria has an audience and is a successful person of the media. Just check out her web page linked in her twitter account, her hard work and social activism speaks for itself. With that great power and reach comes responsibility. As a result of the picture she took I was let go from my job today. Which sucks because I have 3 kids and I really liked that job.
She gave me no warning, she smiled while she snapped the pic and sealed my fate. Let this serve as a message to everyone, our actions and words, big or small, can have a serious impact.
I will be at pycon 2014, I will joke and socialize with everyone but I will also be mindful of my audience, accidental or otherwise.
If you're just starting out, the worst decision you can make is to incorporate as a C-corp. An LLC makes vastly more sense, even for the tiny proportion of companies that want VC funding (and specifically institutional funding - funding from other sources would not matter as much - I'll explain why below). Stripe Atlas really ought to make the default an LLC.
The two major reasons why:
1. When you're a C-corp, you pay taxes twice. Once at the corporate level, and once at the individual level. This matters both for ongoing income but also for any liquidation event - as most liquidation events are asset, not stock, sales, you're getting taxed twice here too.
2. You can go from LLC -> C-corp easily but not the reverse. Why would you make the decision before you have to? Start as an LLC. In the very unlikely event you are taking institutional funding you can convert; in most cases, you'll happily stay as an LLC and keep the extra tax dollars you'd be giving the government.
Finally - all this business that VCs prefer to invest in Delaware C corps because of the legal knowledge there is - sorry - bullshit. They do it because they have to invest in taxed entities, because they themselves are partnerships so their interest in any flow-through entity will flow up to their investors, some of which are non-profits. Non-profits, like pensions, risk losing their non-profit status if they have unrelated business taxable income. There is a solution here, which is to have a special purpose blocker corp that sits in between the VC partnership and the LLC. This is done all the time in private equity but not in VC and there is no principled reason why not.
So there you have it. Don't do Stripe Atlas because you're forcing yourself to make a decision you don't need to make right now, that's irreversible, and that may end up costing you a lot of money.
Thanks for speaking up, contributing your viewpoint on HN and not attacking me.
I'm sorry to hear your employer deciding to not to work with you on this and I hope they reconsider, bring you back on and dealing with it constructively.
For context, I'm a developer evangelist.
That means I'm an advocate for developers, male and female. While I hear abou demanding bosses with impossible deadlines for product launches, I also hear about the experiences of women working at startups.
In both cases I offer suggestions, ideas and mentoring to help the developers become problems solvers. Sometimes the answer is our API or not answering email after 7pm while other times it about being assertive and shedding impostor syndrome.
The forking joke set the stage for the dongle joke.
Yes, this time I decided I didn't want to argue my perspective. I decided instead to accept it bothered me and took action based on the PyCon Code of Conduct. It sounds like if I'd said something about the forking you would have denied it having a sexual association. Not sure if I smiled but I'm also unsure what facial expression you would have expected.
I just got done writing my blog post you can read here: http://butyoureagirl.com/14015/forking-and-dongle-jokes-dont...
See you next year.