C corp vs S corp is not an obvious choice. In my case being a C corp saved me big bucks because of SBIC treatment of my stock when my company was acquired. The taxes from dividend payments were minor compared to the capital gain taxes.
I would suggest starting out as a C corp if you are planning on being acquired. Later if you aren't acquired and the company starts being significantly profitable convert to an S corp.
Zoning will only become an issue if you have a lot of visitors per day and parking becomes a problem.
Instead you should consider your corporate form. Being a C corporation will make your stock into SBIC stock with special US Federal tax treatment. This can be very valuable if the business is successful. On the other hand, S corporations pass out the losses to be deducted against income.
Check on city taxes. Some cities have very high business taxes, some can even be 2-3% of revenue (not profits). It might make sense to incorporate in another city or state to avoid this tax. It really sucks owing city taxes when you are losing gobs of money in the startup phase.
Don't contribute capital to the company and then take it back as salary. Duh - you'll pay income taxes again on your own money. Work for stock instead and use company money for company expenses like travel and equipment. Everyone should work for stock until you start making some sales.
File both your state and federal company taxes, even if you don't owe anything. Not filing can cause you to lose SBIC status.
Don't waste time trying to raise VC. You really don't need it and if you get it you probably end up wishing you hadn't. Pretend like you're still in college and live on pizza.
I'm glad to see the US government supporting an industry consortimum instead of endoring the single vendor solution from Microsoft (Passport). I hope MS' stock gets knocked down on Monday.
Fire the Star Trek writers and hire the ones from Alias. More happens in one Alias episode that five Star Trek movies combined.
Star Trek should fire their entire staff of writers every two years just to get new ideas into the mix. It's like the current writers can only come up with one plot idea a year and they have to stretch it into two movies and three episodes.
Enterprise is just remakes of other Star Trek episodes. It's lame and I don't even watch it any more.
Some enterprising domain registar should start handing out free certs with domain registrations. It would be a good way to boost their domain registration business. If you trust the registar enough to handle your domain you should be able to trust them to handle your certificate too.
All the registar has to do is bribe MS into including their root CA in the next daily IE patch.
Who cares about the W3C any more. When was the last time you saw a piece of software that actually fully implemented a W3C standard? The W3C has rendered itself irrevelent to the Internet.
Mozilla tries, but once MSIE hit 98% share is there really any point in trying to push standards compliance on the Borg?
This latest anti-trust round has made it possible for the PC makers to ship dual boot systems. Hopefully all of the major PC vendors will have some backbone and start offering dual boot Windows and Linux on all of their machines. A shared partition would let you get at data files from both OS's.
Only a few people might initially try out Linux, but over time this would improve. Open Office, Linux games, a mess up or price increase by MS may all be reasons to switch. But having the OS on the hard disk is critical to making the switch easy.
Microsoft needs a villian to rally it's employee against. Linux is playing the part of the villian. Without a credible villian MS will break up into internal fiefdoms like it is doing.
The companies do have a product to sell. It's called IP and they are only looking for one customer.
A software IP company is different. It can be formed with almost zero capital other than money used for salaries. Very few other industries have this attribute. There is no rule that says you have to have expensive offices, a sales force, factories, etc.
Valuable IP is created all of the time. It's just that during the bubble a lot of the same IP was created too many times. This made most of it worthless. There will be new opportunities in the future.
Be prepared to fail. Two out of three or more attempts are going to fail. Here's one of my failures, you can have it for free. http://xpserver.mozdev.org/
Software IP companies can work, I have done several successful ones. I don't recommend doing it useless you are a group of very experienced developers with a knack for assessing future markets. When a company likes this fails, you have only yourself to blame.
If you can't accept this kind of risk go get a job for a salary.
Software companies are different than normal companies. All of the no-pay ones I know of developed software products on speculation. There was never any intention to ship the product directly, the companies are designed to be acquired.
The right group of people can assess the needs a company like Microsoft might have in a couple of years. Even if MS doesn't need it there is a good chance a competitor will. Products can be designed to meet these future needs. Some video games are also built on this model and then sold to the big distributors.
If you don't pay people software R&D companies require almost zero capital. By eliminating the VC the stock holders get to keep 100% of the acquisition dollars.
This is high risk/high reward employment - not a sweat shop. A salary isn't the only way to make money.
My MBA is from Northwestern which is much better than one from Harvard.
Sorry about the spelling. It is late here and I am tired.
Doing a job like this is a long shot, but you have to look at it like a lottery ticket. Sometimes lottery tickets win; but if you never buy a ticket you're never going to win.
Some friends of mine have scored big doing this:
1) One went two years without pay, received $1M in an acquisition.
2) Another went three years and recieved $10M in an acquisition.
3) Three others have spent about a year and given up.
4) I have done very well myself doing this too.
You can't look at these as jobs, you're really an owner. If a five person company fails, you have have to blame yourselft for 20% of the failure.
I've been in touch with tech support at the OEM for my Radeon 9000 Pro, Power Color. They are not happy with the situation and the pressure is on for ATI to get a fix out ASAP. Latest email estimated sometime next week for drivers that work on all of the OEM cards.
I also get the impression that this was not a conspiracy. The drivers use the INT10 support in the card's video BIOS. The OEM video BIOS's vary slightly from card to card depending on what features they implemented (2 DAC vs 1, etc). The driver needs to be adjusted for each of the various BIOS. That's why flashing the ATI BIOS works. ATI just made it work on their cards first and will be filling in support for OEM cards ASAP.
I have a Powercolor Radeon 9000 Pro. I just tried the drivers and they won't boot. They're looking for the PCI vendor id and refuse to load. They are checking PCISubDevice/PCISubVendor. Does anyone have a kernel patch yet to make the PCI code report the ATI values for these fields?
AMD 760MPX and motherboards announced today
on
Athlon MP Reviewed
·
· Score: 1
If the FSF sends letters to RTLinux customers stating that the code they bought is of questionable legal status, then I'd expect the customers to drop use of the product immeditately. No customer wants to be sucked in to a vendor's lawsuit.
You can't Sybase's off of a free version of their commercial database.
Free for commerical use version of Sybase 11.0.3 it is available at http://linux.sybase.com. Note that the other version are pay but their prices are reasonable (not like Oracle).
Such a small view of the world! A lot of the early Linux clustering code was written by a developer in China. Maybe China should have withheld it from the US.
Slashdot Mirror
I would suggest starting out as a C corp if you are planning on being acquired. Later if you aren't acquired and the company starts being significantly profitable convert to an S corp.
Instead you should consider your corporate form. Being a C corporation will make your stock into SBIC stock with special US Federal tax treatment. This can be very valuable if the business is successful. On the other hand, S corporations pass out the losses to be deducted against income.
Check on city taxes. Some cities have very high business taxes, some can even be 2-3% of revenue (not profits). It might make sense to incorporate in another city or state to avoid this tax. It really sucks owing city taxes when you are losing gobs of money in the startup phase.
Don't contribute capital to the company and then take it back as salary. Duh - you'll pay income taxes again on your own money. Work for stock instead and use company money for company expenses like travel and equipment. Everyone should work for stock until you start making some sales.
File both your state and federal company taxes, even if you don't owe anything. Not filing can cause you to lose SBIC status.
Don't waste time trying to raise VC. You really don't need it and if you get it you probably end up wishing you hadn't. Pretend like you're still in college and live on pizza.
I'm glad to see the US government supporting an industry consortimum instead of endoring the single vendor solution from Microsoft (Passport). I hope MS' stock gets knocked down on Monday.
Fire the Star Trek writers and hire the ones from Alias. More happens in one Alias episode that five Star Trek movies combined.
Star Trek should fire their entire staff of writers every two years just to get new ideas into the mix. It's like the current writers can only come up with one plot idea a year and they have to stretch it into two movies and three episodes.
Enterprise is just remakes of other Star Trek episodes. It's lame and I don't even watch it any more.
Bottom line: put more content in the shows.
I can't wait for the trademark lawsuit on this one:
Anderson Windows vs Microsoft Windows.
Some enterprising domain registar should start handing out free certs with domain registrations. It would be a good way to boost their domain registration business. If you trust the registar enough to handle your domain you should be able to trust them to handle your certificate too.
All the registar has to do is bribe MS into including their root CA in the next daily IE patch.
Who cares about the W3C any more. When was the last time you saw a piece of software that actually fully implemented a W3C standard? The W3C has rendered itself irrevelent to the Internet.
Mozilla tries, but once MSIE hit 98% share is there really any point in trying to push standards compliance on the Borg?
This latest anti-trust round has made it possible for the PC makers to ship dual boot systems. Hopefully all of the major PC vendors will have some backbone and start offering dual boot Windows and Linux on all of their machines. A shared partition would let you get at data files from both OS's.
Only a few people might initially try out Linux, but over time this would improve. Open Office, Linux games, a mess up or price increase by MS may all be reasons to switch. But having the OS on the hard disk is critical to making the switch easy.
Microsoft needs a villian to rally it's employee against. Linux is playing the part of the villian. Without a credible villian MS will break up into internal fiefdoms like it is doing.
The companies do have a product to sell. It's called IP and they are only looking for one customer.
A software IP company is different. It can be formed with almost zero capital other than money used for salaries. Very few other industries have this attribute. There is no rule that says you have to have expensive offices, a sales force, factories, etc.
Valuable IP is created all of the time. It's just that during the bubble a lot of the same IP was created too many times. This made most of it worthless. There will be new opportunities in the future.
Be prepared to fail. Two out of three or more attempts are going to fail. Here's one of my failures, you can have it for free. http://xpserver.mozdev.org/
Software IP companies can work, I have done several successful ones. I don't recommend doing it useless you are a group of very experienced developers with a knack for assessing future markets. When a company likes this fails, you have only yourself to blame.
If you can't accept this kind of risk go get a job for a salary.
Software companies are different than normal companies. All of the no-pay ones I know of developed software products on speculation. There was never any intention to ship the product directly, the companies are designed to be acquired.
The right group of people can assess the needs a company like Microsoft might have in a couple of years. Even if MS doesn't need it there is a good chance a competitor will. Products can be designed to meet these future needs. Some video games are also built on this model and then sold to the big distributors.
If you don't pay people software R&D companies require almost zero capital. By eliminating the VC the stock holders get to keep 100% of the acquisition dollars.
This is high risk/high reward employment - not a sweat shop. A salary isn't the only way to make money.
My MBA is from Northwestern which is much better than one from Harvard.
Sorry about the spelling. It is late here and I am tired.
Some friends of mine have scored big doing this:
1) One went two years without pay, received $1M in an acquisition.
2) Another went three years and recieved $10M in an acquisition.
3) Three others have spent about a year and given up.
4) I have done very well myself doing this too.
You can't look at these as jobs, you're really an owner. If a five person company fails, you have have to blame yourselft for 20% of the failure.
I've been in touch with tech support at the OEM for my Radeon 9000 Pro, Power Color. They are not happy with the situation and the pressure is on for ATI to get a fix out ASAP. Latest email estimated sometime next week for drivers that work on all of the OEM cards.
I also get the impression that this was not a conspiracy. The drivers use the INT10 support in the card's video BIOS. The OEM video BIOS's vary slightly from card to card depending on what features they implemented (2 DAC vs 1, etc). The driver needs to be adjusted for each of the various BIOS. That's why flashing the ATI BIOS works. ATI just made it work on their cards first and will be filling in support for OEM cards ASAP.
I have a Powercolor Radeon 9000 Pro. I just tried the drivers and they won't boot. They're looking for the PCI vendor id and refuse to load. They are checking PCISubDevice/PCISubVendor. Does anyone have a kernel patch yet to make the PCI code report the ATI values for these fields?
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Corporate/VirtualPressRo
Motherboards will be ready in February from lots of vendors.
I've never seen pricing for the kit, how much is it going to cost?
Mutant Ninja Turtles and Godzilla would be more likely
Is this how Linuxtoday was just hacked?
"Worldwide scalability. Logically there should be only one system...."
Of course it would be owned by Mirosoft.
If the FSF sends letters to RTLinux customers stating that the code they bought is of questionable legal status, then I'd expect the customers to drop use of the product immeditately. No customer wants to be sucked in to a vendor's lawsuit.
You can't Sybase's off of a free version of their commercial database.
Free for commerical use version of Sybase 11.0.3 it is available at http://linux.sybase.com. Note that the other version are pay but their prices are reasonable (not like Oracle).
Free JDBC for 11.0.3 is here: http://www.sybase.com/products/eaimiddleware/jconn ectforjdbc
This is a real, high performance, commercial quaility database. Why bother playing with a MySQL toy when you can have the real thing?
Such a small view of the world! A lot of the early Linux clustering code was written by a developer in China. Maybe China should have withheld it from the US.
Just what I always wanted, now when Windows crashes it will take out my stereo too!
Phone.com and others are fighting this questionable patent.
There seems to be a pattern with Toshiba caving in while other companies fight.