A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

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Hiring Employee #1

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Hazards of hiring by Eric Sink — Great tips, including some specific to hiring developers (for more on the latter, here’s another ). I don’t care if this person is going to spend 60 hours a week writing inscrutable code that only a Ruby interpreter could love. Writing skills are required.

Hiring 282
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Rise and fall: Three Lessons for Entrepreneurs

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

As David Heinemeier Hansson (the creator of Ruby on Rails and a partner at 37signals ) notes in a recent speech to Stanford students : "Nobody is an overnight success. While at Comtech, my father had developed strong relationships with a few key senior executives at Nissho Iwai Corporation , a huge Japanese trading company.

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How to value your company for sale (Part 1)

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

When selling Smart Bear I had an M&A guy pull data about other companies which (a) sold development tools, (b) were sold recently, (c) were profitable, and (d) were growing. Salesforce.com recently bought Heroku for $250m because the latter controlled fully-managed Ruby on Rails deployments. Profit multiples varied even more.

Sales 260